Acupuncture inserts fine, solid needles, and sometimes applies heat, pressure, or a mild electrical current, at points along a network of twelve primary meridians and two extraordinary vessels that traditional theory holds carry qi, the vital energy that Chinese medicine treats as the basis of health. Illness is understood as a disruption or blockage in this flow, often described through the organ systems, the zang fu, and the balance of yin and yang; needling specific points is meant to restore free circulation and rebalance the whole system rather than to treat an isolated symptom. A typical treatment plan involves a course of sessions rather than a single visit, often combined with other Chinese medicine tools such as moxibustion, cupping, or herbal formulas.
Outside its traditional framework, acupuncture is now widely offered in secular pain clinics, where practitioners often describe its target points in terms of nerves, trigger points, and connective tissue rather than qi and meridians. Large pooled analyses of controlled trials, including a 2018 individual patient data meta-analysis spanning nearly twenty thousand patients, found acupuncture outperforms both no treatment and sham needling for several chronic pain conditions, among them back and neck pain, osteoarthritis, and migraine, though the advantage over sham needling is consistently small. That narrow margin, combined with the difficulty of designing a truly inert sham needle, keeps the field divided over how much of acupuncture's benefit is specific to needling and how much reflects ritual, attention, and expectation. Serious injury is rare in trained hands, though untrained needling carries real risk of infection or organ puncture.