Science suggests acupuncture works, but no one is sure why

WRITTEN BY

Katherine Ellen Foley

When the writer and artist Margarita Gokun Silver had her first migraine after she turned 40, the pain was so bad she vomited before lying in bed, completely incapacitated for the rest of the day.

Over-the-counter painkillers didn’t work. Her doctor, who assured her there was no underlying cause for her migraines, gave her expensive pain medication to try, but it left her with debilitating nausea. After trying a variety of other therapies—ranging from yoga to Canadian painkillers to Botox—she finally settled on acupuncture. It was the one thing that worked, she recently wrote in the Washington Post.

Acupuncture—the act of sticking tiny needles into different parts of the body to try to relieve pain elsewhere—is based on Chinese medicine from over 2000 years ago. In Chinese tradition, acupuncture helps realign the body’s qi (pronounced ‘chee’), which is the energy that flows through various parts of your bodies. It was assumed that when you were in discomfort, either as a result of pain or nausea, your body’s qi was misaligned; the tiny needles, sometimes augmented with heat or electricity, could help realign that energy, with the minor side effects of possibly a little on-site pain and light bleeding.

Although acupuncture was mostly abandoned between the 18th to 20th centuries, it was still practiced informally by Chinese traditionalists. It caught the attention of Westerners when, in 1971, the treatment was provided for a New York Times journalist in Peking, who later wrote(pdf) about the experience.

When the writer and artist Margarita Gokun Silver had her first migraine after she turned 40, the pain was so bad she vomited before lying in bed, completely incapacitated for the rest of the day.

Over-the-counter painkillers didn’t work. Her doctor, who assured her there was no underlying cause for her migraines, gave her expensive pain medication to try, but it left her with debilitating nausea. After trying a variety of other therapies—ranging from yoga to Canadian painkillers to Botox—she finally settled on acupuncture. It was the one thing that worked, she recently wrote in the Washington Post.

Acupuncture—the act of sticking tiny needles into different parts of the body to try to relieve pain elsewhere—is based on Chinese medicine from over 2000 years ago. In Chinese tradition, acupuncture helps realign the body’s qi (pronounced ‘chee’), which is the energy that flows through various parts of your bodies. It was assumed that when you were in discomfort, either as a result of pain or nausea, your body’s qi was misaligned; the tiny needles, sometimes augmented with heat or electricity, could help realign that energy, with the minor side effects of possibly a little on-site pain and light bleeding.

Although acupuncture was mostly abandoned between the 18th to 20th centuries, it was still practiced informally by Chinese traditionalists. It caught the attention of Westerners when, in 1971, the treatment was provided for a New York Times journalist in Peking, who later wrote(pdf) about the experience.