Research casts doubt on the value of acupuncture

But it turned out that acupuncture as Reston described it was not the enduring bit of ancient Chinese wisdom enthusiasts supposed. In fact, the procedure had been written off as superstition back in the 1600s and abandoned altogether in favor of a more science-based approach to healing by the 1800s. Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong had only revived acupuncture in the 1950s as part of his initiative to convince the Chinese people that their government had a plan for keeping them healthy despite a woeful dearth of financial and medical resources.

Even more impressive than how well Mao’s campaign worked in China at the time is how well it is working in the U.S. today. Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans undergo acupuncture for conditions ranging from pain to post-traumatic stress disorder, and the federal government spends tens of millions of dollars to study the protocol.

So far that research has been disappointing. Studies have found no meaningful difference between acupuncture and a wide range of sham treatments. Whether investigators penetrate the skin or not, use needles or toothpicks, target the particular locations on the body cited by acupuncturists or random ones, the same proportion of patients experience more or less the same degree of pain relief (the most common condition for which acupuncture is administered and the most well researched). “We have no evidence that [acupuncture] is anything more than theatrical placebo,” says Harriet Hall, a retired family physician and U.S. Air Force flight surgeon who has studied, and long been a critic of, alternative medicine.