Can acupuncture help with depression?
There isn’t any reliable evidence for using acupuncture for depression. Not even Chinese traditional medicine practitioners would use acupuncture that way, since they traditionally didn’t have a term for depression or most other mental illnesses. Nor, of course, did they have any knowledge of serotonin, the hippocampus, or how the actually brain functions. We ourselves don’t know everything about the brain and depression, but but we know more than we used to. Besides therapy and mediation, there is also good evidence that exercise helps with depression. It is also cheap and good for your health in other ways, so it is hard not to recommend it, because there basically is no downside. The problem with it is that it appears to be difficult to get depressed people to start exercising. They are depressed, after all. But exercise could and should be considered alternative medicine that actually works. St. John’s wort is a plant that people sometimes use to treat their depression. The evidenc
