BRIEF REPORTS The Use of Auricular Acupuncture to Reduce

B oth pharmacologic interventions and psycholog-ical preparation programs are often used to treatpreoperative anxiety (1,2). These interventions, however, can be time consuming, cause undesirable side effects, and increase health care costs, or a com-bination of these. Thus, the search for the low-cost intervention continues. Ear acupuncture, a microacu-puncture technique similar to reflexology, was first described in French and Chinese medicine in 1950 (3,4). It was speculated that the technique worked because groups of pluripotent cells contain informa-tion from the whole organism and create regional organization centers representing different parts of the body (4). Thus, one can stimulate a reflex point and relieve symptoms of distant pathology. Previously, we demonstrated that ear acupuncture at the relaxation point significantly decreased dail