Does Acupuncture Work?
The very short answer is yes. Countless research studies have been conducted proving that acupuncture has an effect on the nervous system, digestive system and endocrine system. There are equally as many studies showing how effective acupuncture is for pain management. Patients self report improvement and the medicine itself has withstood thousands of years of use across multiple continents. Additionally, modern imaging techniques have noted higher rates of neural activity at acupuncture points. With all of this data, it’s obvious that acupuncture has a very clear and measurable response to our bodies.
The confusion comes from the desire for studies to be conducted in a double blind fashion. Normally in a research study you get two groups, those who got the treatment and those who did not. Nobody knows which group they’re in so the outcome isn’t impacted by a placebo effect. In an attempt to adhere to this research standard something called “sham acupuncture” was created. Sham acupuncture is when needles are either inserted into points that are not traditionally considered acupuncture points, or in points that are not normally used for the condition studied.
In theory this sounds like a good solution however in practice it’s problematic for multiple reasons. The first is that there are many ways to treat the same complaint. A person coming to me for a headache may get a completely different treatment than I’d give to their friend who also has headaches. This is because the headaches may have differing root causes, the people I’m treating probably have dissimilar baseline health, or I could just be doing a seperate style of acupuncture on each of them.
On top of this each time you insert an acupuncture needle into a person you will get a response from the body. The points chosen may not be what is considered “optimal” for whatever is being studied but even “optimal” is subjective depending on what style of acupuncture the practitioner is using.
Therefore when a control group in a research study is given “sham acupuncture” they are still receiving acupuncture. The outcome being that the sham acupuncture group and the treatment groups often have closer results than would be expected, which causes some (usually non-acupuncturist) researchers to question the efficacy of acupuncture itself. When results of acupuncture (both sham and treatment groups) are compared to groups that received no acupuncture at all the results are often clearer that acupuncture is indeed beneficial.