Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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.'”
Health.com: Natural remedies for arthritis
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.

Hospitals are beginning to offer alternative health care.

You may not be able to choose untested herbal treatments but alternative therapies with a history of positive results are beginning to show up in hospital services.

What hospitals choose to offer runs the gamut, from well-known therapies such as acupuncture to less familiar treatments like reiki, in which practitioners channel a patient’s energy by placing their hands on or just above specific locations on the body.

Patient demand is the top reason hospitals offer complementary and alternative therapies, cited by 85 percent. Clinical effectiveness? That comes in second, at 70 percent.