“Acupuncture sessions and Alexander Technique lessons both led to significant reductions in neck pain and associated disability compared with usual care at 12 months. Enhanced self-efficacy may partially explain why longer-term benefits were sustained.”

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M15-0667?articleid=2467961&

Acupuncture or counselling, provided alongside usual care, could benefit patients with depression, according to a study published in PLOS Medicine. 

“These findings suggest that, compared to usual care alone, both acupuncture and counseling when provided alongside usual care provided significant benefits at 3 months in primary care to patients with recurring depression. Because this trial was a pragmatic trial, these findings cannot indicate which aspects of acupuncture and counseling are likely to be most or least beneficial. Nevertheless they do provide an estimate of the overall effects of these complex interventions, an estimate that is of most interest to patients, practitioners, and health care providers. Moreover, because this trial only considers the effect of these interventions on patients with moderate-to-severe depression as classified by the BDI-II; it provides no information about the effectiveness of acupuncture or counseling compared to usual care for patients with mild depression. Importantly, however, these findings suggest that further research into optimal treatment regimens for the treatment of depression with acupuncture and counseling is merited.”

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001518

“Numerous studies have concluded that acupuncture can relieve spasticity.

At present, the researches on the antispasmodic mechanism of acupuncture mainly focus on the effect of acupuncture on spasm-related neurotransmitters and receptors, relieving spasticity by increasing the expression of inhibitory transmitters or decreasing the expression of excitatory neurotransmitters.

Some studies have found that acupuncture promotes the recovery of damaged neurons in brain tissue and senior central functions by reducing the expression level of inflammatory factors and regulating cell signal transmission, so as to establish a normal spinal cord reflex mechanism and relieve muscle spasm.

In addition, acupuncture has been proved to protect central neurons by improving blood supply in ischemic areas of the brain and promoting the proliferation of central nerve cells, so as to achieve the functional restructuring of the central nervous system, [Cite #1, Cite #2] which is crucial for strengthening the central control of lower motor neurons to regulate muscle tension and relieve muscle spasm. However, there is still lack of valid evidence to support that acupuncture is effective for poststroke spasticity. Therefore, we will conduct an SR and meta-analysis to assess the effectiveness and safety of acupuncture for poststroke spasticity. It is hoped that the results of this SR may help to establish a better approach for the treatment of poststroke spasticity and provide reliable evidence for its wide application.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6775425/

“Studies using fMRI have shown that acupuncture-induced alterations in the BOLD response are modified in patients with clinical conditions indicating a possible role for cortical plasticity. For example, there was a reduction in sensorimotor hyperactivation in carpal tunnel syndrome following clinical acupuncture treatment (Napadow et al., 2007). In stroke patients, acupuncture stimulation produced greater activations in the somatosensory cortex compared to controls (Li et al., 2006), and in post-stroke aphasia patients acupoint stimulation increased activity in language-related brain areas on the lesion side (Li and Yang, 2011). Such fMRI studies are not able to determine if there are any modifications in the dynamics of neuronal rhythms. It would be of particular interest to extend our MEG beamformer study of manual acupuncture in healthy participants, to various patient groupings with clinical conditions and determine whether there are any differences in source location mappings and associated neuronal oscillatory dynamics.”

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00303/full

“In a rigorously conducted pragmatic randomised controlled trial, we have evaluated the effectiveness of acupuncture as a treatment for irritable bowel syndrome when offered as an adjunct to usual treatment in primary care. Acupuncture was found to significantly improve outcomes at three months, with the number needed to treat being six. We found some evidence of a sustained benefit over the longer term. Acupuncture should be considered as a potential treatment option in primary care alongside other evidence-based treatments.”

https://bmcgastroenterol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-230X-12-150

In the series Trust Me I’m a Doctor, a short section covered a brain scan during acupuncture provided by Hugh MacPherson. The purpose was to explore potential mechanism(s) by which acupuncture might work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT7GpVgUme4