Hsuan-Ting Tang1 Ming-Cheng Huang1,*
1 Department of Chinese Medicine, China Medical University Hospital, Taichung, Taiwan
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Postoperative ileus is the most common and crucial complication following loop ileostomy closure, which leads to important health care issue that may delay discharge from the hospital after surgery. The cardinal symptoms of postoperative ileus include nausea and vomiting, inability to tolerate oral intake, abdominal distension, and delayed passage of flatus or stools. At present, supportive care including pain management, diet restriction, bowel decompression with a nasogastric tube placed, peripheral nutritional support is the mainstay of treatment for those with postoperative ileus. However, the gastrointestinal recovery time is unpredictable. This 69-year-old male patient diagnosed as rectal cancer six months ago owing to recurrent rectal bleeding. After surgical intervention of robotic low anterior resection and concurrent chemoradiotherapy, he was admitted to the China Medical University Hospital for ileostomy closure surgery on July 6, 2021. Because of postoperative complications such as constipation and abdominal distension, the patient asked for acupuncture treatment as adjuvant therapy. Only a few feces the patient defecated after three sessions of acupuncture treatments. He had a nasogastric tube placed for bowel decompression resulted from consistent abdominal distension and vomit episodes. Given to the dose of acupuncture might be insufficient, we shifted the manual acupuncture to electroacupuncture. Then, his abdominal distension was greatly relieved, and the defecation gradually increased. The colonoscopy showed no obvious fecal impaction which confirmed the effect of electroacupuncture therapy. After six sessions of the electroacupuncture treatments, the patient with improved appetite was discharged smoothly. As a result, we believe that electroacupuncture can effectively ameliorate the symptoms of postoperative ileus after ileostomy closure surgery, restore gastrointestinal motility, and help patients to be discharged early.
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