If you’ve been to a Naturopath or Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner, I’m sure that you’ve heard about acupuncture and the wondrous things that it can do for you. The truth is that acupuncture has a myriad of applications for which it is a valuable intervention. For a long time the mechanisms behind acupuncture remained a mystery, which led it to be disregarded as an extensive placebo effect. In recent research however, multiple explanations have been offered for the varied and highly effective outcomes produced by acupuncture treatments. So how does it really work?

Energetic theories aside, there are numerous well-studied biological reactions to acupuncture that have been discovered in recent years. The simplest of the mechanisms is the basic reaction of the body to the needle – needles cause minor damage to tissue which the body attempts to heal by increasing blood flow to the site. This increased blood flow is useful if the area being acupunctured has a higher requirement for nutrition, immune system cells or just healing in general. The increase in blood flow brings all of these things to the tissues being acupunctured and consequently, the tissues which are under higher demand of these things benefit from this increased supply.

Another, separate mechanism of action has been proposed to explain acupuncture’s analgesic effects. Although it may seem strange to think that puncturing someone with a needle causes pain relief, this is exactly what has been found in the field. It has recently been discovered that bodily insertion of acupuncture needles causes an increased release of the brains own natural opioids – chemicals similar to morphine – which increase tolerance to pain. Given that opioids also promote feelings of well being, one side effect of this release is that patients are often happier and more relaxed following acupuncture treatments.

Finally, it has been shown in the research that acupuncture causes your body to enter a more relaxed, less stressed state of being. In medical terms, this is called stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. As you can imagine, these three effects of acupuncture come together to make an incredibly versatile treatment. It is the combination of these mechanisms that allow acupuncture to be used for everything from pain relief for tight muscles to increasing uterine blood flow for improved fertility. The best part is that this research is only in its infancy. Perhaps in years to come we’ll discover even more ways in which this phenomenal intervention is affecting our bodies and improving our health.