How does acupuncture work?
An introduction to Chinese Medicine
As an acupuncturist, I’ve spent spent a great deal of time thinking about how acupuncture works and trying explain in a way that makes sense. It seems like something that should be so easy to explain yet after many years of thought and practice, it isn't.
At least, the act of performing acupuncture is straightforward enough. We start what is probably the simplest medical instrument this side of a tongue depressor: the acupuncture needle. Take that needle, insert it in to the body quickly and with as little discomfort on the part of the patient as possible, then just leave that needle in place for about 30 minutes. Take the needle out and the process is over. Now, how could that possibly do anything?
If you were to ask a hundred different acupuncturists and a hundred more acupuncture researchers that question, you would get at about twenty unique answers. Some of these experts would talk about endorphins, others about activity in the brain, or the structure of the soft tissues and still others would use terms like qi, the five elements, and the harmony of yin and yang. The answers you would get would sound so different as to be nearly incompatible. Thus far, attempts that have been made to create a universal theory to explain all the aspects and nuances of acupuncture seem quite incomplete.
I believe that there is no single “right answer” that fully explains the mechanism of acupuncture because acupuncture works in many different ways. In some circumstances, acupuncture causes the body to produce endorphins. At other times, it affects specific centers of the brain. It can modulate the immune and endocrine systems and in the traditional system of Chinese Medicine, acupuncture is understood to affect other qualities of the body such as yin, yang, qi and the meridians. Furthermore, in most cases, acupuncture does several of these things at once. Even though they are not all scientific, these ideas are each correct in their own way and personally I use most of them to understand some part of what I do.
Many people would not agree with my willingness to accept a variety of explanations for the effectiveness of acupuncture. To them, it would seem preferable to have a simple elegant mechanism to explain how inserting a needle might ease such diverse symptoms as pain, depression, nausea, insomnia, fatigue and infertility but I prefer complex multifaceted explanation because, after all, human beings live complex multifaceted lives. Yes, we are physical beings but we are also social, emotional, and spiritual as well. A medicine that hopes to work with such people should reflect this diversity by understanding the body in many ways.
In this vein, I would like to offer a broad explanation for how acupuncture works: Acupuncture works by stimulating the innate healing mechanisms of a person (and by person I mean the whole person - body, mind, spirit and whatever else). I would’t say that is the “right” explanation in that it does not address specific mechanisms but it is a good general one. It says, in effect, that the acupuncture needle does nothing; the person and their response to the needle does everything. The mechanism is indirect.
Let me resort to an analogy to clarify things a bit. When you drop a stone on the ground, what does it do? Nothing, of course. If drop that same stone in stream it will still do nothing but the stream will change to move around it. If you really know what you're doing and you know how streams react to stones, you can change the stream in all kinds of ways. The key to cracking the riddle of acupuncture is that it's not about the act of dropping the stone it's about the path of the stream.
It's all about context.
An orange cone does nothing in and of itself but place a few across a busy street and see what happens.
With this in mind, it should be no surprise that there are many perspectives about how acupuncture works. Acupuncture is designed to elicit a reaction from the richly diverse system that is the human body and mind.