Acupuncture in the News: June 2026
The Interstitium: a link between eastern medicine and western biology?
The New York Times recently published an interactive feature about the interstitium, a new circulatory system discovered in recent years that may have a role in the how acupuncture’s meridians might work.
“This pathway doesn’t go in the veins, it doesn’t go superficially,” says Andrew Ahn, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. It goes instead, he told me, into the interstitium between the muscles: “When I saw that, I said: ‘We’re onto something. This truly has to do with acupuncture.’”
As with the distal needling techniques we use in Backupuncture, the 1000s of years of acupuncture wisdom are providing new avenues for exploring anatomy via the interstitium and its possible functions. Definitely check it out.
acupuncture for pain succeeds in a double-blind study — the “gold standard for research”
National Geographic also published an acupuncture-related piece, this time about a major research breakthrough showing that acupuncture for pain held up in a double-blind study — the “gold standard for research” (though usually applied to drug development, not surgery or manual therapies) in which neither the patient northe practitioner were aware of whether they were receiving acupuncture or not. While it doesn’t totally reflect how acupuncture is practiced in terms of how needles are used, that it nevertheless showed an affect beyond placebo even under these restrictive and artificial conditions removes the placebo argument from the arsenal of serious scientists and policymakers.
Since NatGeo article is paywalled, here is a summary:
For decades, the question of whether acupuncture works beyond the placebo effect has lingered, with the “true face” of acupuncture remaining “elusive,” according to Judith Schlaeger, a professor at the College of Nursing at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Researchers previously lacked the ability to use a double-blind randomized controlled trial to separate genuine physiological effects from placebo. That barrier may now be shifting: Schlaeger’s team has completed what they describe as the world’s first double-blind acupuncture trial involving 89 women with chronic vulva pain. The trial rested on the development of a specially designed placebo needle, newly developed by Nobuari Takakura of Tokyo Ariake University of Medical and Health Sciences. As Takakura explains, “without a double-blind study environment, the decoding of the mechanisms of acupuncture would be impossible.”
The findings, published in the Journal of Pain, show that both real and sham acupuncture provide relief—but not equally. True acupuncture offers much longer-lasting relief of up to 12 weeks, while placebo relief diminishes after four weeks. True acupuncture creates a micro-injury that releases chemical substances; “the central nervous system is excited,” Schlaeger says, “triggering the body’s natural long-term repair mechanisms.” Takakura adds that while placebo-powered “relief fades quickly because there is no lasting stimulus,” this marks “the clear boundary between the fleeting nature of placebo versus the sustained effect of a true intervention.” Still, larger studies and replication are needed.
The evidence for acupuncture only gets cooler!