Does acupuncture really work and what is the best and most rewarding one to have?

yes it works some times and the best i guess is the stress one.

First off let me start off by saying that I do believe acupuncture works. I recently injured myself at work while lifting a heavy box. I seemed to have pulled a back muscle just under the ribcage on the left side of my body. I did not have medical insurance at the time; therefore I was reluctant to paying a visit to a 鈥渞egular DR鈥? I went ahead and looked into acupuncturist and found one that had good reviews on a website. Dr. Ciao made me take off my shirt so he could examine my back and then he pressed certain spots to see if it hurt. I then layed on the right side of my body. He then started to stick needles into my back starting from my lower neck down to my tail bone area. I would say about 5 needles total. This part did not hurt, but then again I have several tattoos and my pain tolerance for needles is substantial. The part that really surprised me was when he hooked up little clamps that looked like mini jumper cables, you know for dead batteries, and then started some sort of electroshock therapy. It tingled and he adjusted it to where I was comfortable. He left me laying there for about 30 minutes while I laid in a dimmed room. He came back to check on my several times making sure I was not in any sort of discomfort. After taking the needles out he then wiped my back with an alcohol swab and gave me a back massage. He told me I would be in great pain for the next couple of days and it was true. My back hurt for about a whole day but after that all my pain was gone.
Yes, Acupuncture does really.

I have used Acupuncture on two separate occasions.

I used acupuncture to give up smoking. Smoke for 20+ years. I was sceptial about the acupuncture working, but after my session I walked out a complete non-smoker.

I carried on my usual routines but had no desire, no cravings, no nothing. It was so bizarre. I could sit with smokers but yet never be tempted. So yes it does work.

I also had acupuncture for a back injury in combination with physio.

I fully understand how it works, but I am so glad it does.
Acupuncture is about the only alternative medicine to have some science basis. The whole hippy hypothesis of energy lines is rubbish but there is a thing called the gateway hypothesis of pain.

Different nerves carry different sensations and the nerves carrying pain are different from those that carry touch or temparature.

The acupuncture needles stimulate other nerves which can dull the nerves transmitting pain. Hurrah
Trying to answer whether acupuncture actually works is very challenging. First, acupuncture is used in a broad variety of applications, and dedicated practitioners may claim that the rebalance of qi, the body鈥檚 energy field, will fix almost anything. This is clearly not true, and failure for acupuncture to give results for many different types of medical conditions has been proven.

Yet, a blanket no to the question of whether acupuncture actually works is not easy to give either. Some scientific tests have shown some limited effectiveness in treating a few conditions. Further, there are the many people who anecdotally claim acupuncture helped them with conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, generalized anxiety disorder, and the list goes on.

The US National Institute of Health concluded in 1998 that acupuncture may have some benefits and its use might be expanded to traditional medicine in some applications. However, the report also concluded more studies were required.

In 1999 the British Medical Journal examined close to 50 trials of acupuncture to enhance healing after stroke. The trials showed effectiveness ranging from mild to very effective. Cecil Adams, writer of The Straight Dope concludes Chinese researchers only published positive results. That鈥檚 a fairly wide leap to take when no evidence exists that results had been tampered with.

However, Roberts does point out that the American Journal of Acupuncture shows that research fails to prove its effectiveness. The conclusion of the Journal is that clinical trials may not be an adequate test of a practice with a very different type of methodology and philosophy.

In other words, Eastern medicine may require different clinical trials than Western medicine. This conclusion sounds a bit strange, and weakens the argument that acupuncture actually works. If it does, it should be able to be clinically verifiable.

Where people have not benefited from Western medicine, they often look to alternative solutions like acupuncture. It cannot be denied that some people benefit from acupuncture. It is, however, hard to say how much benefit one will achieve, if any. Sometimes belief that something will work, works as well as the treatment, which is called the placebo effect. When people have lost faith in traditional medicine, they may find their condition improves when nontraditional medicine is tried.

Simply being told that acupuncture will help, when Western doctors offer no solutions is often enough for the mind to mentally improve someone鈥檚 condition, especially when pain-related. This is because perception is definitely linked to the amount of pain one feels. In fact, many clinics now offer a cognitive behavioral approach to pain management, which has clinically been proven more effective than acupuncture.

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