• Journal of Naturopathy
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.51-61
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• 2024

Background: Manual acupressures in the correction and recovery of spinal deformities are known to be effective. However, they rely on therapists' skill and often require a long treatment time. The shortcomings of the manual therapy are anticipated to be effectively mitigated through self-gravitational acupressures (SGA) which stimulate multiple acupoints simultaneously with acupressure tools. Objective: The study aims to verify the effect of SGA for the correction of sagittal standing posture. Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on the postural improvements of the 93 subjects who underwent the SGA intervention, leveraging self-gravity for stimulating neck, back, pelvis, and calf areas both overall and sequentially using a set of acupressure tools equipped with multiple acupressing rods. Degree of posture abnormality was assessed before and after the SGA intervention using the photographic images of the subjects' sagittal standing postures, based on the angles of inclination of the upper body (from external auditory meatus to pelvis) and the lower body (from pelvis to malleolus) from the gravitational line passing through the hip joint. Results: After the SGA intervention, the upper body inclination angle was observed to decrease from an average of 3.2° to 1.6° (50.0% reduction, p<.001), and the lower body inclination angle decreased from an average of 3.5° to 3.2° (8.6% reduction, p<.01). Conclusion: The observed results underpin that SGA is effective for the correction of postural deformities. For the clinical application of SGA, prospective research is needed to optimize SGA protocol and acupressing tools and to validate long-term clinical efficacy.