Analgesic Effect of Acupuncture for Patients With Rib Fractures

This open‐label, randomized controlled trial will involve 150 patients who have traumatic rib fractures. Subjects are randomly assigned to acupuncture group, laser acupuncture group or sham laser acupuncture group with a 1:1:1 ratio. The intervention will be performed on the consecutive three day after allocation. Bilateral LI4 (Hegu), SJ6 (Zhigou), ST36 (Zusanli) and GB34 (Yanglingquan) are used for each group. The traditional acupuncture group will be performed by inserting needles to a depth of 15‐35 mm and last for 15 min. The laser acupuncture will be performed with the gallium aluminum arsenide LaserPen, which delivered 0.375 J of energy at each of the acupoints. Subjects in the control group underwent sham laser acupuncture treatment without any laser output. The acupuncture points, application duration, and total number of treatments were similar to those in the laser acupuncture group.