Research into acupuncture as a medical treatment has grown

exponentially in the past 20 years, increasing at twice

the rate of research into conventional biomedicine. Over this

period, there have been over 13,000 studies conducted in

60 countries, including hundreds of meta-analyses

summarizing the results of thousands of human and animal

studies.1 A wide-variety of clinical areas have been studied,

including pain, cancer, pregnancy, stroke, mood disorders,

sleep disorders and inflammation, to name a few.

While acupuncture enjoys high-level clinical evidence

for dozens of conditions, translating trial research into

official medical guidelines can take time. However, a

recent review examined clinical guideline recommendations

from around the world made by a variety of groups including

government health institutions, national guidelines, and

medical specialty groups. Over a 27 year period, they found

2189 positive recommendations for acupuncture for 204

health problems, mainly in guidelines published in North

America, Europe and Australasia. These official recommendations

indicate that acupuncture’s evidence is now acknowledged by

medical experts and that acupuncture is no longer ‘alternative.’

Indeed, this new data illustrates that acupuncture is one of the

most widely recommended treatments in modern medicine.

With nearly 1,000 systematic reviews of acupuncture,

getting a sense of what the evidence shows can be a

challenge. Fortunately, the entire literature base was

summarized in 2010 by the Australian Department of

Veteran Affairs. This review was updated in 2014 by

the US Department of Veteran Affairs and then again in

2017 by John McDonald and Stephen Janz, the authors

of the Acupuncture Evidence Project.

The Acupuncture Evidence Project reviewed the effectiveness

of acupuncture for 122 treatments over 14 clinical areas. They

found some evidence of effect for 117 conditions. “Our study

found evidence for the effectiveness of acupuncture for 117

conditions, with stronger evidence for acupuncture’s effectiveness

for some conditions than others. Acupuncture is considered safe

in the hands of a well-trained practitioner and has been found

to be cost-effective for some conditions. The quality and quantity

of research into acupuncture’s effectiveness is increasing.