Acupuncture research is difficult to do well. Blinding is hard when the intervention involves needles, placebo controls are contested, and the practitioner's skill is itself a variable. These problems are real, and they mean the literature has to be read carefully rather than counted.
The picture is uneven. For some chronic pain conditions, notably chronic lower back pain and tension-type headache, a number of trials and several systematic reviews report effects that are modest but real. For other conditions the evidence is thin, inconsistent, or absent. Some claims made in the name of acupuncture have no meaningful support at all.
We teach this honestly because students who are told only the favourable half of the evidence are poorly equipped for practice. They will meet sceptical patients, and the ability to say 'the evidence here is modest, and here is what it actually shows' is a professional skill, not a weakness.
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“For some chronic pain conditions, notably chronic lower back pain and tension-type headache, a number of trials and several systematic reviews report effects that are modest but real.”
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