A Landmark for Acupuncture

A Landmark for Acupuncture

Changzhen Gong, Ph.D.

American Academy of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine

Since I began working in the arena of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine twenty years ago, I developed a habit of keeping track of acupuncture-related research appearing in Pubmed, the online medical research database developed and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. When results of a clinical trial are published, I share them with my students as soon as possible. When there are new developments in the field of acupuncture mechanisms, I like to discuss them with my colleagues. When I see an arresting fMRI image, I print and save it. Based on current trends, I expect that the number of acupuncture-related Pubmed articles will hit 20,000 by the end of 2013.

Recently, during a routine review of Pubmed, I noted a sudden jump in the number of acupuncture-related articles: 14 articles were added in one day. Generally, this only happens upon the release of a new issue of either China Acupuncture and Moxibustion (Zhong Guo Zhen Jiu) or Acupuncture Research (Zhen Ci Yan Jiu), both of which are official publications of the Acupuncture and Moxibustion Institute under the China Academy of Chinese Medical Science. This time, I was surprised to see that the source of so many new articles was not one of the Chinese-language journals: it was a volume of the International Review of Neurobiology. The whole 344-page volume (Volume 111, 2013) was dedicated to the neurobiology of acupuncture. This is a landmark event for acupuncture research and the profession of acupuncture and oriental medicine. An entire issue of a mainstream medical journal devoted to acupuncture! First time ever in a scientific medical journal!

Even more amazing than the number of pages and the number of research articles in Neurobiology volume is the content of the articles. The fourteen research articles fall into two main categories: basic scientific research, and clinical research. The former category includes studies on acupuncture point specificity, neuroendocrine regulation, neurongenesis, and neurotrophin modulation. The clinical-research category includes the application of acupuncture to stroke, high blood pressure, psychiatric illness, insomnia, gastrointestinal diseases, drug addiction, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. Reading these research articles makes one realize that acupuncture is not just an empirical medical tradition anymore: it has become a medical science. Various studies describe how acupuncture signals are transmitted in the central nervous system, how acupuncture helps neurons’ survival, development and function, how acupuncture regulates the neuroendocrine system, and how acupuncture points function. Evidence from the clinical trials supports the clinical efficacy of acupuncture on stroke, high blood pressure, insomnia, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological diseases.

Acupuncture has become a global medicine, attracting the attention (and research dollars) of scientists from China, Japan, South Korea, the United States and Europe. Acupuncture research contributes new fuel toward the growth of a traditional medical field. As acupuncture research moves on, the acupuncture profession is propelled by this fuel.