ABSTRACT
Childbirth is a painful experience for most of women. Acupressure is a noninvasive method that has been suggested for labor pain relief. The aim of present study was to determine the effect of acupressure on labor pain relief among parturient women in Kamali hospital in city of Karadj, near Tehran in year 2006. This double-blind randomized clinical trial was performed on 128 women in labor admitted with cervical dilatation of 3 cm. They were randomly assigned to intervention group with 30 minutes of acupressure on SP-6 point or comparison group with SP-6 point touch for 30 minutes. Visual analogue scale assessments were used to measure labor pain in both groups and to compare the results in several stages: before intervention, immediately after intervention, 30 minutes after intervention, and then every hour until the end of the first stage of labor. Differences of pain intensity as measured in different stages within each group were also compared with each other. None of the above-mentioned comparisons showed a significant difference, except for significant difference in pain intensity as measured at different stages within each group, which indicated increasing pain intensity from immediately after intervention through the end of the first stage of labor in both groups [p<0.0001]. These finding showed that SP-6 point acupressure alone cannot effectively relieve labor pain and needs to be accompanied with other noninvasive analgesic methods