Chronic pain can cause disability, mild to severe suffering and high medical costs. Some unfortunate patient do not improve despite administering conservative treatment and then the various interventional therapies, including oriental medical treatment and/or surgery, and they find themselves in search of a more effective pain relief. Deep dry needling is one of the newer treatment modalities for these patients. The last 10 years have seen a lot of progress in understanding the neural pathways and the type and extent of tissue involvement during chronic pain. This in turn has stimulated the development of new treatment techniques, and deep dry needling is one of them. So, the authors of this paper discuss the individual theories, the characteristics and future directions of several deep dry needling techniques, and we examine the new dry needling technique that has been recently developed in Korea.
Chronic Pain* ; Humans ; Korea ; Neural Pathways

Humans ; Mesencephalon ; Neural Pathways ; Pain ; Spinal Cord

Basolateral Nuclear Complex ; Amygdala ; Neural Pathways

Zona Incerta ; Prefrontal Cortex ; Fear ; Neural Pathways

To manifest visual acuity of 20/20 or better, the requirements are good optical imagery, foveal fixation, intact receptor structure and function, and full integrity of the involved neural pathways. Person with hyperopia of 1-10 diopter or astigmatism of 1 diopter may be able to read the line marked 20/20 of Snellen's chart. Non-cycloplegic and cycloplegic subjective manifest refractions were done on 380 normal eyes with visual acuity of 20/20 or more to observe the prevalence, type and degree of the refractive errors. The results were as follows; 1. In non-cycloplegic subjective manifest refraction, 147 eyes(38.7%) had refractive error such as simple hyperopic astigmatism(50.3%), hyperopia(37.4%), simple myopic astigmatism(6.8%) and compound hyperopic astigmatism(5.4%). In cycloplegic subjective manifest refraction, 183 eyes(48.2%) were ametropia such as simple hyperopic astigmatism (49.7%), hyperopia(38.3%), compound hyperopic astigmatism(8.7%) and simple myopic astigmatism(3.2%). 2. As to the type of astigmatisms, "with the rule" astigmatism was 2.5 times more than "against the rule". 3. Average degree of refractive errors were 0.12 diopter in non-cycloplegic refraction and 0.22 diopter in cycloplegic refraction. 4. The degree of hyperopia was less than 1.00 diopter in all cases of noncycloplegic refractions and in most cases(93%) of cycloplegic refractions. 5. Degree of astigmatism were less than 1.00 diopter in the majority(98%).
Astigmatism ; Humans ; Hyperopia ; Neural Pathways ; Prevalence ; Refractive Errors ; Visual Acuity*

Electromyographic responses of the clavotrapezius and extraocular horizontal rectus muscles to the stimulations of the anterior semicircular canal nerves were observed to expore the funtional relationships between the canals and these canals muscles 1. The clavotrapezius muscle was inhibited stimulating the ipsilateral anterior canal nerve and excited by stimulating the contralateral anterior canal nerve. These responses were reversed by stimulating of the functionally paired posterior canal nerves. 2. During the clavotrapezius muscle responded to a prolonged stimulation of the ipsilateral anterior canal nerve, a superimposed stimulation of the contralateral anterior canal nerve reversed the initial response. 3. The medial rectus muscle was excited and the lateral rectus muscle was Inhibition by simulating the ipsilateral anterior canal nerve, and these responses were reversed by stimulating the contralateral canal nerve. Based on these results, it is concluded showing the functional connections between the receptor canals anti the effector muscles for the vestibuloocular and vestibulocollic reflexes, that the excitatory neural pathways from the vestibular nucleus to the cervical and ocular motoneurons are crossed to the opposite side, whereas the inhibitory from the nucleus to these axial motoneurons are uncrossed.
Animals ; Cats* ; Muscles* ; Neural Pathways ; Reflex* ; Semicircular Canals*

The erectile response is peripherally mediated by cavernous nerve that contains thoracolubar sympathetic nerve and sacral parasympathetic nerve. It is known that thoracolubar sympathetic nerve involves in detumescence and sacral parasympathetic nerve in tumescence, however there are some opinions that rhoracolubar sympathetic nerve participates in psychogenic erectile mechanism. We previously reported that by the comparison with electrostimulation-induced erection, apomor- phine-induced erection was a vascular event. The aim of our study was to determine the infraspinal neural pathway of APO-induced erection. The sham operated rats remained normal in all measured respects. All rats having undergone neurotomy ot the hypogastric nerves showed APO-induced erection except one. The only 5 rats having undergone neurotomy of the pelvic nerves showed APO-induced erection. Erections could be elicited upon cavernous or pelvic nerves stimulation in all rats having undergone neurolomy of the hypogastric nerves. Among 17 rats having undergone neurotomy of the pelvic nerve erection could be elicited upon cavernous nerves slimulation in 14 rats, however. the intracavernous pressure (47.9+/-16.5 mmHg) was lower than that found in sham-operated rats. Erectile response in these 14 rats appeared to result from stimulation of penile neurons coming from the major pelvic ganglion. In contrast to no response in sham-operated rats, stimulation of the hypogastric nerves also resulted in erections in 7 out of 17 rats. In conclusion, this present study suggests that APO-induced ereclion is primarily mediated via the sacral parasympathetic nerve system and may be mediated by the thoracolumbar sympathetic pathway following injury to the parasympathetic nerve system. Furthermore we can guess the possibility that the neural pathway of psychogenic erection is same that of AP0- induced erection.
Animals ; Apomorphine ; Ganglion Cysts ; Models, Animal* ; Neural Pathways* ; Neurons ; Rats*

Cerebral Cortex ; physiology ; Humans ; Neural Pathways ; physiology ; Taste

Entorhinal Cortex/physiology* ; Hippocampus/physiology* ; Neural Pathways/physiology*

PURPOSE: To obtain preliminary data for understanding the central auditory neural pathway by means of functional MR imaging (fMRI) of the cerebral auditory cortex during linguistic and non-linguistic auditory stimulation. MATERIALS AND METHODS: In three right-handed volunteers we conducted fMRI of auditory cortex stimulation at 1.5 T using a conventional gradient-echo technique (TR/TE/flip angle: 80/60/40 degree). Using a pulsed tone of 1000 Hz and speech as non-linguistic and linguistic auditory stimuli, respectively, images-including those of the superior temporal gyrus of both hemispheres-were obtained in sagittal plases. Both stimuli were separately delivered biaurally or monoaurally through a plastic earphone. Images were activated by processing with homemade software. In order to analyze patterns of auditory cortex activation according to type of stimulus and which side of the ear was stimulated, the number and extent of activated pixels were compared between both temporal lobes. RESULTS: Biaural stimulation led to bilateral activation of the superior temporal gyrus, while monoaural stimulation led to more activation in the contralateral temporal lobe than in the ipsilateral. A trend toward slight activation of the left (dominant) temporal lobe in ipsilateral stimulation, particularly with a linguistic stimulus, was observed. During both biaural and monoaural stimulation, a linguistic stimulus produced more widespread activation than did a non-linguistic one. CONCLUSION: The superior temporal gyri of both temporal lobes are associated with acoustic-phonetic analysis, and the left (dominant) superior temporal gyrus is likely to play a dominant role in this processing. For better understanding of physiological and pathological central auditory pathways, further investigation is needed.
Acoustic Stimulation ; Auditory Cortex* ; Auditory Pathways ; Ear ; Linguistics* ; Magnetic Resonance Imaging* ; Neural Pathways ; Plastics ; Temporal Lobe ; Volunteers