Traditional acupuncture is a healthcare system that originated in China and other East Asian cultures where it still features in mainstream healthcare, both as stand-alone therapy and in combination with conventional Western medicine. Acupuncture is now widely used and accepted all over the world. In the UK more and more people are finding out what acupuncture can do for them.
Acupuncture works to help maintain your body’s equilibrium. It involves the insertion of very fine needles into specific points on the body to regulate the flow of ‘qi’ (pronounced chee), your body’s vital energy. For a number of lifestyle and environmental reasons, qi can become disturbed, depleted or blocked, which can result in some symptoms of pain or illness. In certain instances, traditional acupuncture can be an effective therapy to help restore balance and promote physical and emotional harmony.
Click here to watch a video that explains traditional acupuncture.
What are the benefits of acupuncture?
A lot of people seek acupuncture to help relieve specific conditions, especially pain conditions such as tension headaches, migraines, neck or back pain, osteoarthritis of the knee and temporomandibular joint pain. Clinical trials have shown that acupuncture does relieve these symptoms, at least in the short term.
Whatever your particular problem, because treatment is designed to affect your whole body and not just your symptoms, you may notice other niggling complaints also get better with a course of treatment. Indeed, some people choose acupuncture when they feel their bodily functions are out of balance, but they have no obvious diagnosis.
Once tried, many people have regular or ‘top-up’ treatments because they find it so beneficial and relaxing. For some conditions, such as migraine, acupuncture can be given to prevent flare-ups from occurring. People also have acupuncture for other health problems. For example, there is clinical evidence that acupuncture provides short-term relief for overactive bladder syndrome.
Another benefit of acupuncture is that it can be given alongside other therapies and/ or medication, in almost all circumstances.
Researchers can only draw firm conclusions about whether acupuncture is effective or not when high-quality evidence is available. In the last decade, the evidence regarding some chronic pain conditions has become much stronger.
Based on this evidence, in 2017, the National Institute for Health and Research issued a Signal (a short summary of recently published research) that acupuncture was effective for some chronic pain and was not a placebo. However, for many conditions there are simply not enough good quality clinical trials for researchers to draw firm conclusions.
Please see the British Acupuncture Council's A-Z list of different conditions to see the evidence of acupuncture.