Are there any research studies showing acupuncture to be efficacious?
There is a lot of research validating the effectiveness of acupuncture. The National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine says this about the current body of acupuncture research: “There have been many studies on acupuncture’s potential health benefits for a wide range of conditions.” Summarizing earlier research, the 1997 NIH Consensus Statement on Acupuncture found that, overall, results were hard to interpret because of problems with the size and design of the studies. In the years since the Consensus Statement was issued, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has funded extensive research to advance scientific understanding of acupuncture. Some recent NCCAM-supported studies have looked at: • Whether acupuncture works for specific health conditions such as chronic low-back pain, headache, and osteoarthritis of the knee. • How acupuncture might work, such as what happens in the brain during acupuncture treatment. • Ways to better identif
