Acupuncture is a complex area of medical study and practice with thousands of years of continuous reorganization, adding, and editing of information. Not surpirsingly, current theories of acupuncture vary widely and are as diverse and controversial today as they have been in the past.

Current acupuncture theory can be summarized into three broad categories:

For millennia, Traditional Acupuncture has been used to alleviate pain, discomfort, mental stress and other symptoms and disorders by restoring balance to the body's flow of subtle energy called Qi (pronounced "chee" as in "cheese"). Qi activates the body's basic vital substances and internal processes that regulate and maintain overall functional health and vitality.

When the flow of Qi is interupted or disturbed it causes an imbalance in the total quality and quantity of Qi in the body. This imbalance of Qi is experienced as a wide variety of common symptoms such as pain (headaches, lower back pain, neck pain, arthritis, etc), emotional and behavioral problems (depression, anxiety, worry, stress, addictions, etc), problems with sleep, poor digestion, recurrent infections, constipation, etc.

Traditional Acupuncture works by unblocking, rebalancing, and maintaining the flow of Qi in your body to not only alleviate a wide variety of poor health conditions and symptoms, but also to support overall wellness by preventing future imbalances from occurring. In some cases, unblocking the flow of Qi with Traditional Acupuncture can also help treat more complex symptoms and medically defined poor health conditions that often do not respond to drugs or surgery alone.

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Western Medical Acupuncture

Although not well understood and inconclusive, some recent scientific evidence supports that acupuncture is therapeutically effective for certain biomedically-defined conditions when all traditional theories and concepts of acupuncture are disregarded. This has led to the formation of Western Medical Acupuncture theory.

Still in its infancy, Western Medical Acupuncture aims to understand acupuncture purely from within the limits of objective cause and effect sequences that are arrived at through strict analytic and reductionistic methodology. As a result, Western Medical Acupuncture seeks to identify the benefits of acupuncture in relation to empirically measurable neuroanatomical structures and biochemical processes. Using this approach, some evidence has shown that acupuncture is effective for a wide variety of conditions and Western-defined diseases, namely those associated with pain and inflammation.

But problems with study design, reproducibility, and establishing an adequate control have slowed the development of a widely-accepted, evidence-based biomedical model of acupuncture that explains exactly how and why acupuncture works. Consequently, the observed benefits of acupuncture by and large remain regulated to the placebo effect.

Nevertheless, all traditional concepts and theories of acupuncture aside, one area where acupuncture has gained a lot of biomedical notoriety has been in its ability to reduce pain. Recent research suggests that the pain-relieving effects caused by needling acupuncture points may be initiated through a series of reactions that in turn release biochemicals that block pain and activate the immune system. Evidence proposes that this activation of the immune system may explain not only the mechanism behind acupuncture's pain-reducing effects, but also its wide diverse therapeutic effects in regulating stress and other inflammatory conditions and chronic disorders now linked to inflammation. By activating the immune system and triggering an inflammatory response, acupuncture may be used to help improve the body’s natural response and adaptation to mental and physical stress, harmful pathogenic micro-organisms, and cellular waste, while also reducing pain and other related symptoms.

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Acupuncture is one of the tools of a new emerging model of healthcare known as Integrative Health. Integrative Health seeks to incorporate traditional and emerging models of medicine that emphasize the restoration and preservation of the holistic and dynamic balance between the various aspects of the mind, human consciousness, and the physical body in health outcomes. In general, Integrative Health views acupuncture as a safe and effective approach that has been shown to be clinically effective and therapeutically useful for certain biomedically defined poor health conditions and symptoms, namely those involving pain and inflammation.

However unlike Western Medical Acupuncture, integrative acupuncture enables both the traditional and modern knowledge and application of acupuncture to be incorporated to compliment emerging healthcare concepts that are now targeting the field of physical-mental-spiritual healing known as Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), also referred to as psychoendoneuroimmunology (PENI) or psychoneuroendocrinoimmunology (PNEI). In this model, the traditional theories of acupuncture are preserved and included as part of a mixed approach that allows higher levels of human consciousness, including the patient's belief in treatment, to be accepted as places from where imbalances can originate and be healed.

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