Acupuntura No Tratamento Complementar De Covid-19 E Suas Sequelas: Revisão Integrativa

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic affected the world significantly, becoming a global crisis, with its onset in Wuhan, China, in 2019. The beginning of this pandemic left a trail of deaths due to lack of knowledge of an effective form of treatment. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) was proposed as an adjunctive treatment with standard treatments during the pandemic since it was successfully used in the SARS-CoV epidemic in 2002. Acupuncture is a branch of TCM, which has been used for about 5000 years and was used as an adjunct in COVID-19 cases. Based on this scenario, this work aimed to evaluate, based on scientific literature, the use of acupuncture as an effective adjunctive treatment for COVID-19 and its sequelae. This is an integrative review, with a search in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases, dated from 2019, in English and Portuguese languages. The search resulted in 151 articles that, after removing duplicates, applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, and reading them completely, only nine studies were eligible and comprised this review. There are few studies on the use of acupuncture related to COVID-19, most of them in association with other adjuvant therapies. The studies used in this review showed relevant clinical improvements, such as improvement in symptoms such as general malaise, improvement in oxygen saturation and regression of clinical conditions, but with little scientific rigor. From this review, it is suggested that new and more robust clinical studies be carried out with the use of acupuncture, since studies of this nature are essential to a better understanding of the real therapeutic effect of the technique.