Trying to answer whether acupuncture actually works is very challenging. First, the practice is used in a broad variety of applications, and dedicated practitioners may claim that the rebalance of qi, the body’s energy field, will fix almost anything. This is clearly not true, and failure to see results for many different types of medical conditions has been proven.
Still, a blanket "no" to the question of whether acupuncture actually works is not easy to give either. Some scientific tests have shown some limited effectiveness in treating a few conditions. Further, there are the many people who anecdotally claim this treatment helped them with conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, generalized anxiety disorder, and the list goes on.
The US National Institute of Health concluded in 1998 that this treatment may have some benefits and its use might be expanded to traditional medicine in some applications. However, the report also concluded more studies were required.
In 1999, the British Medical Journal examined close to 50 trials of acupuncture given to enhance healing after stroke. The trials showed effectiveness ranging from mild to very effective. Cecil Adams, writer of The Straight Dope concludes Chinese researchers only published positive results. That’s a fairly wide leap to take when no evidence exists that results had been tampered with.
However, Adams does point out that the American Journal of Acupuncture shows that research fails to prove its effectiveness. The conclusion of the Journal is that clinical trials may not be an adequate test of a practice with a very different type of methodology and philosophy.
In other words, Eastern medicine may require different clinical trials than Western medicine. This conclusion sounds a bit strange, and weakens the argument that acupuncture actually works. If it does, it should be clinically verifiable.
Where people have not benefited from Western medicine, they often look to alternative solutions like acupuncture. It cannot be denied that some people benefit from this treatment. It is, however, hard to say how much benefit one will achieve, if any. Sometimes belief that something will work, works as well as the treatment, which is called the placebo effect. When people have lost faith in traditional medicine, they may find their condition improves when nontraditional medicine is tried.
Simply being told that acupuncture will help, when Western doctors offer no solutions is often enough for the mind to mentally improve someone’s condition, especially when pain-related. This is because perception is definitely linked to the amount of pain one feels. In fact, many clinics now offer a cognitive behavioral approach to pain management, which has clinically been proven more effective than acupuncture.
