Robotically-Assisted Acupuncture Brings Ancient Healing Technique Into the 21st Century.....

Sunnyvale, CA- Developed intuitively through painstaking trial and error over many thousands of years, traditional Chinese acupuncture has proven time and time again its ability to ameliorate and even cure a variety of medical conditions. But one of its greatest strengths, the intimate connection between practitioner and acupuncture needle, has also been its most significant weakness. Taking advantage of the robotic technology now used by surgeons to perform a variety of minimally-invasive procedures, cutting edge acupuncture providers are increasingly able to provide relief for patients that were once felt to be either poor candidates, or had failed to improve despite treatments with traditional acupuncture.

The healing art may be ancient Chinese, but the modern technology augmenting it in most cases is pure American. The da Vinci Surgical System involves state of the art robotic technology and features a 3D high-definition magnification system and instruments able to maneuver with greater precision than the human wrist and fingers. This allows the acupuncturists to both locate and successfully target hard to reach acupoints, such as those on the scrotum and anal verge. This expands the number of conditions amenable to acupuncture significantly.

An acupuncturist and acupuncture anesthetist perform robotically-assisted acupuncture on a patient who has been feeling kind of tired lately

"It's obvious to me that this is an improvement, a paradigm shift if you will. A leap forward in our ability to take care of our patients," da Vinci Gynecologic acupuncturist Mort Fishman explained. "It really comes down to the bottom line. If someone in my family needed acupuncture, would I want that provider to be trained in robotics? Yeah, I would."

The improved vision and manual dexterity enjoyed by providers using the da Vinci system has allowed acupuncture to catch up to other alternative medical fields, some of which have been incorporating modern technology into their treatments for years. Chiropractors, practitioners who treat a variety of musculoskeletal conditions and asthma for some reason, have historically used a variety of high tech electronic devices to locate abnormalities in the spine called subluxations. The subluxations can then be treated using a variety of manual spinal adjustment techniques.

Fishman, who is a pioneer in robotically-assisted minimally-invasive acupuncture fertility treatments, is already looking ahead. "As science progresses, and we continue to scale down robot technology, the practice of acupuncture will be taken completely out of the hands of the practitioner, allowing full mental focus on diagnosis."  He envisions a time in the future when even robot-assisted acupuncture will seem old fashioned and the practice of nanopuncture will cure us of all disease.