Acupuncture Research for Stress & Anxiety Relief
Understanding Research in Chinese Medicine
Chinese Medicine, which includes Acupuncture and herbal medicine, has supported women’s health for thousands of years — from puberty through pregnancy, menopause, and beyond. It’s a holistic system that has spread across the world and continues to help millions of people find balance and wellbeing.
While Chinese Medicine isn’t a cure-all for everyone or every condition, a growing body of research supports its effectiveness. However, studying it through a modern scientific lens presents a few unique challenges.
Firstly, Chinese Medicine is highly individualised. Each treatment is tailored to the person’s specific symptoms and constitution. This makes it wonderfully personalised, but difficult to test in standardised trials where every participant must receive the same treatment to measure outcomes consistently.
Secondly, placebo effects are hard to rule out. High-quality studies often compare real Acupuncture with a “sham” or fake version, but creating a true placebo is tricky. With more than 300 Acupuncture points on the body, even a needle placed away from a main point may still have a positive effect, making it challenging to separate true treatment effects from placebo responses.
Finally, research funding is often limited. Large, well-designed studies require substantial financial support, and funding for Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine research can be harder to access than for pharmaceutical-based research.
Despite these hurdles, evidence continues to grow. Many universities and research institutions around the world are publishing studies that confirm the benefits of Acupuncture and herbal medicine for stress, anxiety, and a wide range of health concerns.
Acupuncture, stress and anxiety research
This review by Qian-Qian Li et al 2013 found there’s emerging evidence to suggest the way Acupuncture works is to alleviate the ‘fight or flight’ response and restore balance within the brain and in the body.
“Emerging evidence indicates that Acupuncture treatment not only activates distinct brain regions in different kinds of diseases caused by imbalance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic activities but also modulates adaptive neurotransmitter in related brain regions to alleviate autonomic response.”
A 2018 Systematic Review of 13 research papers by Amorim et al, showed Acupuncture may be effective for anxiety disorders.
“Overall, there is good scientific evidence encouraging Acupuncture therapy to treat anxiety disorders as it yields effective outcomes, with fewer side effects than conventional treatment. More research in this area is however needed.”
While more studies are needed to confirm these results, this Systematic Review of 30 studies by Shergis et al in 2016 found Acupuncture may be effective for insomnia.
“Acupuncture compared to sham/placebo and pharmacotherapy showed statistically significant results”