Research
What reading the acupuncture literature at scale turns up, including in our own database.
The following 11 pages are in Research.
Research pages
Auricular point code collisions
Published ear-point codes carry no scheme, so one code names different points in different nomenclatures. AcuiQ counted how often that misread its corpus.
Modern research · Anyone · 9 min
Conformance register
Every norm AcuiQ holds its own database to, the authority behind each one, and how much of the corpus deviates.
Modern research · Anyone · 8 min
Cost-effectiveness of acupuncture
What economic evaluations alongside UK, German and US trials reported as the cost per QALY of acupuncture, the thresholds they used, and how NICE reached different verdicts.
Modern research · Anyone · 11 min
Errors in the catalogue’s Chinese point names
What a check against a character dictionary and GB/T 12346-2021 found in the characters and pinyin of 773 points, and what each kind of error needed to be caught.
Modern research · Anyone · 6 min
Evidence maps
Six overviews of acupuncture's systematic reviews, from 2011 to 2025: what each counted, how it graded the evidence, and which conditions it placed at the top.
Modern research · Anyone · 9 min
Mechanism studies in people
What human experiments with naloxone, brain imaging, opioid-receptor PET and tissue sampling reported about what a needle does, and what they could not show.
Modern research · Anyone · 11 min
Placebo and expectation
What trials measured when they varied practitioner contact, asked patients what they expected, or told them their acupuncture was a placebo.
Modern research · Anyone · 10 min
Positive results in acupuncture research and in AcuiQ’s data
Of 252 controlled trials of acupuncture indexed to 1995, every one from China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan was positive. AcuiQ audited its own 3,385 sources in July 2026 and found the same pattern in its database.
Modern research · Anyone · 14 min
Reading an acupuncture trial
What the STRICTA reporting standard asks a trial report to contain, how the control, blinding, outcome and sample size shape a result, and how RoB 2 and GRADE judge it.
Modern research · Anyone · 10 min
Sham acupuncture
The kinds of sham control acupuncture trials use, what was measured about each, and why a result reported against sham compares two active procedures.
Modern research · Anyone · 12 min
Where the trials come from
Where acupuncture trials are run, published and indexed, how often a trial called randomised was randomised, how registered outcomes changed, and how results differ by language.
Modern research · Anyone · 9 min