Acupuncture as Neuromodulation: How It Can Explain Ancient and Modern Acupuncture Paradoxes

Abstract

Though contemporary research meta-analyses and large randomized controlled trials of acupuncture demonstrate its efficacy and efficiency in pain and non-pain conditions, the lack of a defined mechanism for how needling an acupuncture point produces beneficial clinical effects has hindered acupuncture’s integration into allopathic medical practices. This paper provides a neuroanatomic model of acupuncture signaling that is consistent with acupuncture basic and clinical studies, and that may also potentially provide answers to 2000 year-old paradoxes contained in the Huangdi Neijing treatise.