[On the mechanism of action of acupuncture analgesia (author's transl)].

The correlation between the effects of acupuncture (A) and hypnosuggestion (H) on subjective pain perception was studied in normal volunteers using somatosensory evoked potentials technique. Both methods influenced identically the subjective pain perception and affected the evoked cortical responses similarly. In those subjects in whom analgesia was achieved, location of the A needles proved unimportant and the suppression of the cortical response elicited by A or H was identical. This could be explained by cortically induced inhibitory activity in descending control systems for both methods. A. analgesia thus appears to be a suggestive modality which depends on individual susceptibility. A specific cultural background also seems to be of importance.