Korea-U.S. joint researchers found that the interaction between patient and therapist affects acupuncture therapy and the related mechanism brain-scientifically. It is expected to be used as a new convergence therapy technology by controlling brain area to increase its effect in the future.

Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM) has conducted the joint research to find out the mechanism of central nerves such as brain and spinal cord related to acupuncture therapy with Harvard Medical School to develop technology to increase effect of acupuncture therapy.

The research team has prepared the scientific basis of Oriental Medicine treatment by discovering the difference of brain structures between the patients with chronic lumbar pain and the normal people and change of the brain structure of the patients with acupuncture therapy.

The team focused on the interaction between patients and therapists to develop the new convergence therapy technology using various factors. It is well known that the interaction between patients and therapists plays important role in treatment in clinical setting but neuro-physiological evidence was not enough to prove this.

So the team has been planning and conducting the clinical research to explain the interaction between patients and therapists in a brain science way especially the end of last year they discovered that the interaction between patients and therapists has relationship with the effect of actual acupuncture therapy and hardened their foundation for sequence research.

On closer inspection the team synchronized two MRI machines to measure brain reaction in real time due to the interaction and used hyper scan method to measure and analyze each of patients’ and therapists’ brains. Going further from the existent static experiment that only scanned one time of each subjects they synchronized two MRI machines and used brain functional imagining hyper scan method which is measuring both subjects brain reaction and applied facial expression and emotion analyzing method based on AI. In addition through the cameras and monitors installed on MRI machines patients and therapists can interact in real time by looking each other’s facial expression and eyes.

In this experiment 23 patients with more than 1 year of fibromyalgia and 22 acupuncture therapists had participated. The team caused pain by pressing patients’ left legs and designed to stimulate a double sided-blood spot and hematopoietic blood spot with electropuncture. After this they measured patients’ and therapists’ brain reaction with each MRI at the same time and observed pain degree that the patients feel when therapists operated telehealth treatment with the button connected electropuncture. 

The result shown that patients’ pain was relieved acupuncture treatment and as the result of analyzing correlation between pain degree and interaction (Facial expression) the more the interaction the smaller patients’ pain and shown meaningful correlation with each other. The more facial expression from patients and therapists changed due to one another the more interaction was shown.

Furthermore the MRI measurement result both patients and therapists shown activity response from the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) where is related to interaction (Social mirroring effect) the greater interaction the greater activity response similarity of patients’ and therapists’ TPJ and it is found that the more similarity the more effect of pain improvement.


※ Mirroring effect : A act of following the others action unwittingly. In this experiment patients and therapist affected by one another and copy their facial expression corresponds to this.


It is a result not only from the facial expression analysis but also from the result that in the brain activation analysis the interaction affects acupuncture therapy. 

In addition the team has done additional comparative analysis in other area of brain shown activity response to figure out how TPJ activity response affects acupuncture therapy.

In consequence the fact that frontocortical area which is related to pain among brain areas is active with TPJ and arbitrate painkilling effects is found.

The team is planning to confirm the additional relation between the interaction of patients and therapists and the curative effacement in a follow-up study as longitudinal research that reflects the treatment from actual clinical sites.


※ Longitudinal research: A research method in which researchers observe and study how characteristics of the object changes as time goes by.

Meanwhile this research was conducted by main project support from KIOM under Ministry of Science and ICT. The result of this research was published in international academic journal ‘SCIENCE ADVANCES.’
