Acupuncture is a promising therapy for relieving symptoms in chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CP/CPPS), which affects >15% of adult men worldwide. The aim of the study was to assess the effects and safety of the use of acupuncture for CP/CPPS. MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, Web of Science, CBM, CNKI, Wang-Fang Database, JCRM, and CiNii were searched from their inception through 30 N...

CONTEXT Acupuncture is widely used to prevent migraine attacks, but the available evidence of its benefit is scarce. OBJECTIVE To investigate the effectiveness of acupuncture compared with sham acupuncture and with no acupuncture in patients with migraine. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PATIENTS Three-group, randomized, controlled trial (April 2002-January 2003) involving 302 patients (88% women), me...

BACKGROUND Acupuncture and moxibustion have widely been used to treat lateral elbow pain (LEP). A comprehensive systematic review of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) including both English and Chinese databases was conducted to assess the efficacy of acupuncture and moxibustion in the treatment of LEP. METHODS Revised STRICTA (2010) criteria were used to appraise the acupuncture procedures...

Twenty-one patients with Sjögren's syndrome were given four different kinds of acupuncture stimulation, at acupuncture points previously used to treat xerostomia. The local blood flux in the skin overlying the parotid gland was measured with laser Doppler flowmetry before, during and after the acupuncture stimulation. The results showed that the local blood flux increased significantly during a...

BACKGROUND Acupuncture is widely used by patients with chronic pain although there is little evidence of its effectiveness. We investigated the efficacy of acupuncture compared with minimal acupuncture and with no acupuncture in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee. METHODS Patients with chronic osteoarthritis of the knee (Kellgren grade < or =2) were randomly assigned to acupuncture (n=1...

In a clinical setting, acupuncture treatment consists of multiple components including somatosensory stimulation, treatment context, and attention to needle-based procedures. In order to dissociate somatosensory versus contextual and attentional aspects of acupuncture, we devised a novel form of placebo acupuncture, a visual manipulation dubbed phantom acupuncture, which reproduces the acupunct...

Acupuncture is becoming an increasingly popular treatment in veterinary medicine. Scientific validation of the effects and benefits of acupuncture is essential for acceptance by colleagues and clients and integration of acupuncture into conventional veterinary medicine. An ever-expanding body of evidence-based research supports acupuncture as a clinically useful modality and over 10,000 referen...

In light of the recent results consistently produced by meta-analyses of clinical acupuncture studies, acupuncturists have been challenged to re-evaluate the principles of acupuncture practice. This paper reconsiders acupuncture, positing that the fascia is the mechanism of action of acupuncture therapy. Acupuncture is defined behaviorally, and recent research findings related to the form and f...

There is almost universal agreement that the quality of clinical trials of acupuncture is poor. There is an urgent need to improve their quality. The author develops here a list of 45 criteria important in the design, implementation, and writing up of controlled clinical acupuncture trials. This list has been compiled after examining the quality assessment criteria used in meta-analyses and sys...

The role of acupuncture in facilitating smoking cessation is controversial. A systematic review was undertaken, incorporating meta-analytic techniques, of all the available randomized controlled trials examining the effectiveness of acupuncture in smoking cessation. Based on the data from nine trials involving 2707 patients, the odds ratio of abstinence at 6-12 months' follow-up is 1.48 (95% co...