Presentation summary

Co-Authors :
Pei-Hsuan Li
Department of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan,
Tzu-Yuan Kang
Department of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan,
Ming-Cheng Huang
Department of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan,
School of Chinese Medicine, College of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan,
Yu-Chen Lee
Department of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan,
School of Chinese Medicine, College of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan,
Cheng-Li Lin
Management Office for Health Data, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan,
Hung-Rong Yen
Department of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan
School of Chinese Medicine, College of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University, Taichung, Taiwan
hungrongyen@mail.cmu.edu.tw

Introduction :
Acupuncture has been applied as a therapeutic intervention for the treatment of numerous diseases. Beneficial effects of acupuncture has been reported globally 1-5. However, there is still a lack of literature analysis for the field of acupuncture utilization in recent years.

Methods :
We used the full-population dataset of National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD) toanalysis the acupuncture utilization of beneficiaries older than 20 years old. We compared the data of sex, age, urbanization areas, different disease categories and also identified whether there is a statistical difference of utilization of acupuncture with the outbreaks of COVID-19 during 2020 and 2021.The demographic data, treatment distributions by disease categories of acupuncture users were analyzed by descriptive statistics.

Results :
The one-year prevalence of acupuncture users slightly decreased from 11.5% in 2012 to 10.57% in2020, followed by a dramatic decline to 2.62% in 2021 when COVID-19 was prevalent (p<0.001). Patients who were female, elder, resided in highly urbanized areas and suffered from injury or diseases of themusculoskeletal system accounted for the most number of acupuncture usage, while the low urbanized areahas the highly percentage of acupuncture users in this area. Cerebral infarction is the most common reason forcomplex acupuncture treatment.

Conclusions :
Our study may provide useful information for clinical research and practice as well as to the government and societies for health policy decision making.