Back pain. Headaches. Allergies. Arthritis. Anxiety. Morning sickness. Acupuncture practitioners claim their centuries-old approach can successfully treat dozens of medical problems — with few side effects or risk of complications.
Many health care providers see acupuncture as a possible tool to battle the U.S. opioid epidemic. Recently, the American College of Physicians recommended using acupuncture as one of the first treatments for lower back pain, and the Joint Commission's "Pain Management Standards" now includes acupuncture as a non-pharmacological strategy for managing pain.
Western medicine proposes several theories on how acupuncture works. One premise: It releases the body's own painkillers, or endorphins. Another hypothesis, the Gate Control Theory of Pain, argues that the body shuts down pain receptors in response to acupuncture's needling.
In Eastern medical lingo, ailments are described in terms of an excess of or deficiency in yin or yang, forces that are connected and interdependent. Energy flows through the meridians or pathways of the body. These pathways connect via acupuncture points that relate to internal organs; acupuncture's specialized needle placements improve the flow of energy and promote healing.
Although there's much evidence that acupuncture often alleviates pain and successfully treats a range of symptoms and diseases, there's no clear answer as to whether acupuncture is a microneedle magic bullet. Many skeptics argue that any benefits of getting stuck probably derive from a placebo effect.
That's because it's difficult to test the efficacy of acupuncture. In double-blind studies, one group receives the conventional drug or treatment while another group receives a placebo. The problem is, there are no good placebo substitutes for acupuncture. Another problem in assessing acupuncture (and many other medical treatments) is that ailments often simply resolve themselves.
So maybe acupuncture's usually positive results are from a placebo effect. Or maybe all those needles somehow stimulate the body to heal itself or suppress pain. Or maybe getting yourself stuck works due to an as-yet-discovered process. If you are the patient, since it works, maybe you shouldn't overthink it.
After all, thousands of drugs and medical procedures are approved and prescribed to treat conditions at enormous cost every day, often without a precise understanding of why they work, or even whether they are effective at all compared to other approaches or doing nothing. Unlike acupuncture, often these approved and accepted treatments pose serious risks to patients who undergo treatment.
