Improving acupuncture research: progress, guidance, and future directions (2024)

Conventional allopathic medicine—medications and surgery used in conventional systems of medicine to treat or prevent disease—is often expensive, can cause side effects and harm, and is not always the optimal treatment for long term conditions such as chronic pain.1 Where conventional treatments have not been successful, acupuncture and other traditional and complementary medicines have potential to play a role in optimal patient care.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) 2019 global report, acupuncture is widely used across the world.2 In some countries acupuncture is covered by health insurance and established regulations. In the US, practitioners administer over 10 million acupuncture treatments annually.3 In the UK, clinicians administer over 4 million acupuncture treatments annually, and it is provided on the NHS.4

Given the widespread use of acupuncture as a complementary therapy alongside conventional medicine, there has been an increase in global research interest and funding support over recent decades. In 2009, the European Commission launched a Good Practice in Traditional Chinese Medicine Research (GP-TCM) funding initiative in 19 countries.5 The GP-TCM grant aimed to investigate the safety and efficacy of acupuncture as well as other traditional Chinese medicine interventions.

In China, acupuncture is an important focus of the national research agenda and receives substantial research funding.6 In 2016, the state council published a national strategy supporting universal access to acupuncture by 2020.6 China has established more than 79 evidence-based traditional Chinese medicine or integrative medicine research centers.

Given the broad clinical application and rapid increase in funding support for acupuncture research, researchers now have additional opportunities to produce high-quality studies. However, for this to be successful, acupuncture research must address both methodological limitations and unique research challenges.

This new collection of articles, published in The BMJ, analyses the progress of developing high quality research studies on acupuncture, summarises the current status, and provides critical methodological guidance regarding the production of clinical evidence on randomised controlled trials, clinical practice guidelines and health economic evidence. It also assesses the number and quality of systematic reviews of acupuncture. We hope that the collection will help inform the development of clinical practice guidelines, health policy, and reimbursement decisions.

The articles document the progress of acupuncture research. In our view, the emerging evidence base on the use of acupuncture warrants further integration and application of acupuncture into conventional medicine. National, regional, and international organisations and health systems should facilitate this process and support further rigorous acupuncture research.