[Advances and thinking about prevention and treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases by acupuncture and moxibustion].

OBJECTIVE: To provide scientific foundations for clinical and acupoints researches on acupuncture for treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases. METHODS: Review the correlated documents of clinical experimental researches issued from 1995 to 2005, and the clinical and experimental documents about remedy of inflammatory bowel diseases by acupuncture and moxibustion were summarized and analyzed. RESULTS: Acupuncture and moxibustion had significant therapeutic effects on inflammatory bowel diseases, and the studies on the mechanisms have achieved some progresses, but the designs and the methods of these studies need to be improved. CONCLUSION: Afterwards, the specificity of acupoints, and factors of influencing the specificity should be studied via effective diseases treated with acupuncture and moxibustion, so as sum up common regularity, rich and develop the theory about specificity of acupoints to guide clinical treatment of acupuncture and moxibustion.