Enhancing perioperative pain management: the integrative potential of acupuncture in urological surgery – authors' reply.

This article is a response to a comment on a study about acupuncture for perioperative pain after open radical prostatectomy. The authors address the comment by discussing the complexity of pain experiences, the generalizability of their results, the choice of acupuncture points, and the impact of acupuncture on recovery parameters. They agree that their study opens up possibilities for non-pharmacological pain management in urology and encourage future research to explore patient diversity, qualitative results, the neurophysiological basis of acupuncture, and the implementation of acupuncture in routine care. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare and the study has not been presented elsewhere. [Extracted from the article]