Observation Of The Clinical Efficacy On Knee Osteoarthritis Treated By Tuina Therapy Of Four-Finger Massage

Background&ObjectiveWith the symptoms of joint pain and limitation of movement, knee osteoarthritis (KOA) is one of the most common diseases of elderly people. Tuina treatment can dredge the meridian, enhance qi and blood circulation, relieving spasm and pain which makes significant effect in releasing the symptoms. By observing the clinical effect of "Four-finger Massage" treatment for KOA, this research intend to provide the theoretical basis for KOA treatment with Tuina therapy, and to make the "Four-finger Massage" therapy more widely accepted in clinical practice.Method60patients with knee osteoarthritis were randomly assigned into two groups named as Tuina group (30case) and Control group (30case). All of them visited Jiangsu Province Hospital of TCM during April2012to January2014. Members of Tuina group accept " Four-finger Massage" treatment while the other patients in the group of control treated by Chinese herbal application. Each group of patients accept treatment once a day and seven days makes a course. Efficacy evaluation is given before and after two courses treatment. VAS(Visual Analogue Score), WOMAC (Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Arthritis Index) and Lequesne’s AFI (Lequesne’s Algo-Functional Index) are adopted as judgment criteria to evaluate the clinical effect.ResultNo obvious differences were found about all the patients on gender and scores of VAS-. Lequesne’s AFI and WOMAC before the experiment started. The difference of scores is statistically insignificant (P>0.05) which means the2groups were comparable.Scores of both two gropus reduced significantly after the treatment. Both two groups received statistically significant difference when comparing the post-treatment score with their pre-treatment ones (P<0.01). It demonstrates that the symptoms of joint pain and stiffness of the patients reduced effectively. Compared the post-treatment scores between two groups, the result shows statistically significant difference (P<0.05), which means the therapy tuina group adopts makes better effect than the therapy used in control group during this experiment. The total effective rate of Tuina group is96.7%, while70.0%in the control group, and after statistics analysis by Wilcoxon rank sum test there is significant difference between two groups (P<0.01). It demonstrates that tuina therapy makes a better therapeutic effect than external application therapy in this experiment.ConclusionIt suggest that "Four-finger Massage" therapy reduce the symptoms of joint pain and stiffness effectively which enhances the living quality of patients. This helpful therapy deserves to be applied widely.