Being pierced by countless needles before major surgery can be painful enough, and the notion of receiving acupuncture afterward may sound like torture to some.

But a preliminary study looking at patients who subjected themselves to just that following open heart surgery showed that nearly all felt acupuncture helped. And most said they would do it again -- in a heartbeat.

The study is one of three at Los Angeles' Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that will gather information for larger studies on the benefits of acupuncture, massage and guided imagery therapy following surgery.

According to Dr. Gregory Fontana, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Cedars-Sinai and director of the acupuncture section, the responses were overwhelmingly positive.

"Basically, what we found was that 19 of the 20 patients who received acupuncture thought it was just great. They reported being pleased overall. About 85 percent said they would pay out of their pockets for more acupuncture even at the price point we said it would be. And with the massage patients, it was the same -- a very, very positive reaction," he said.

Acupuncture has long been used in major medical procedures outside this country, according to Dr. Donald Novey, director of the Center for Complementary Medicine at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois.

"Acupuncture is even used as anesthesia for some surgeries in China, where they won't use anything else. It's also used during labor instead of an epidural. So this stuff really gets quite sophisticated, depending on the skill of the practitioner," he said.

"The biggest obstacle in making this available to heart surgery patients is educating the open heart surgeons. That's going to take years because the general rule in medicine is that the more life-threatening the condition, the more conservative you should be," Novey says.

"So when you're dealing with something as physiologically fragile as a patient who is fresh from open heart surgery, you're going to use something that's been time-tested," he says. "Change happens slowest in areas where it's truly life and death."

Dr. Irving Kron, chairman of the American Heart Association's surgical council, notes that alternative therapies are starting to be embraced by some heart surgeons, and it's a trend he endorses.