Trends in deqi research: a text mining and network analysis

Publication date: Available online 8 March 2018Source: Integrative Medicine ResearchAuthor(s): O Sang Kwon, Junbeom Kim, Kwang-Ho Choi, Yeonhee Ryu, Ji-Eun ParkAbstractDeqi is a term describing a special state of the human body, which is ready to cure itself through acupuncture stimulation and is believed to be a key factor in acupuncture treatment. However, knowledge about deqi remains subjective. Therefore, in this study, we aimed to determine the factors related to deqi generation based on present studies to promote the progression of deqi research.A term frequency–inverse document frequency (Tf-idf) was used to extract key elements from the abstracts of 148 articles searched from Pubmed, and the network structure between key elements was analyzed.A total of 37 items were extracted from the abstracts. Each item was categorized into one of three groups (acupuncture-related sensation, interventions or organ/mechanism). Acupuncture-related sensation was studied by comparing the items in the interventions group with the organ/mechanism group. Key elements related to deqi generation included muscles from the organ/mechanism group and intensity, depth and pressure from the interventions group. Items that belonged to the acupuncture-related sensation group were divided into two clusters: one cluster consisted of pain, tingling, aching, soreness, heaviness, fullness and numbness; the other included warm, cold and dull.We could find out that the trend of deqi was leaning towards ...

Source: Integrative Medicine Research - July 10, 2018 Category: Complementary Medicine Source Type: research