Author Spotlight: Understanding the Mechanism of Tuina Manipulation in Rats

We studied the mechanism of Tuina manipulation in treating knee osteoarthritis. We found that Tuina is effective for pain relieving and improving motor functions. However, there is still standard protocols for Tuina of KOA, and the conclusions are not reliable enough, so we are trying to build a standard protocol.

Recently, many teams have begun to develop Tuina on massage robots, which can output special mechanical wave forms for manipulation to achieve standardization of techniques. In addition, there are some cell mechanic loading devices, which can now put the manual force for the cell for cellular research. We believe that the difficulty of Tuina in animals is how to maintain the standardization of manipulation and how to accurately locate acupuncture points.

We preliminarily verified the effect of Tuina on inhibiting synovial inflammation and the cartilage of proptosis through preliminary experiments, which will point out the direction for future research on the mechanism of Tuina for KOA. In the future, we’ll focus on the mechanism of Tuina for KOA, mainly related to the mechanical signal transduction pathway, and how to inhibit synovial inflammation and cartilage apoptosis.