Therapeutic sensations show high similarity between different body-oriented therapies

Complex bodily sensations that patients experience during therapeutic interventions are a common phenomenon in many body-oriented therapies. Despite the striking similarity of sensations across different therapy systems, no attempt has been made so far to understand their characteristics and clinical relevance from a perspective that transcends the borders between these systems. We searched the pubmed database for the terms ‘therapeutic sensation’, ‘deqi’, ‘needling sensation’, ‘enhanced touch sensation’, ‘acupuncture sensation’, ‘propagated sensation’, and alternative spellings thereof. We identified 311 studies of which we included those that reported verbal descriptors together with their relative frequencies, i.e. information on how often each descriptor had been used by subjects to describe their TS. To reflect both within- and between-study variance we first calculated relative frequencies for each of the descriptors used in the single studies. We then multiplied these frequencies by the weighting factor n/27, where n was the number of studies reporting the descriptor at least once. The results were transformed into a word cloud. Our final sample consisted of 27 studies which comprised different acupuncture modalities (manual, electric, auricular, laser), tactile stimulation, focused ultrasound as well as various sham or placebo interventions. We found that the terms which are most frequently used to describes therapeutic sensations across various fields were ‘numbness’ (37.6), ‘tingling’ (36.4), and ‘soreness’ (31.4), followed by ‘heaviness’ (24.0), ‘dull pain’ (23.4), ‘aching’ (22.1), ‘fullness’ (21.1), ‘sharp pain’ (18.6), ‘pressure’ (15.1), ‘distention’ (13.7), ‘warmth’ (13.3), ‘throbbing’ (10.6) and ‘spreading’ (7.4), where the numbers in brackets denote the product of mean and weighting factor. Sensations experienced during therapeutic interventions are highly similar in their qualitative nature across different modes of stimulation and therapies. Since no generally accepted scientific term exists for this phenomenon, we propose the term ‘therapeutic sensations’ (TS) for it. TS may be a thread linking seemingly unrelated therapy systems and even explain some pre-scientific concepts, like the meridians of Chinese medicine or the idea of some form of energy exchange between practitioner and patient.