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Ancient Chinese medicine has utilized acupuncture for thousands of years and the West has caught on.

For decades, now, acupuncture has been used to treat a variety of maladies with glowing testimonials from those who have benefitted from this mysterious practice.

Anecdotal evidence aside, a new study published this week in the Archives of Internal Medicine appears to validate the legitimacy of acupuncture therapy to alleviate pain.

Acupuncture, which originated in China, involves placing needles in specific locations or “meridians” of the body in order to treat various ailments, especially pain. Acupuncture practitioners claim the technique relieves pain by modifying energy flow through the body.
“Acupuncturists talk about concepts coming from outside traditional biomedicine,” Vickers explains. “Doctors will say, ‘I didn’t learn about energy flow in Physiology 101.'”
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The energy-flow theory has met with a great deal of skepticism in the United States and other Western nations, and researchers have failed to identify other, biological underpinnings for the treatment.