Acupuncture in the West

Acupuncture reached Europe and North America several times, and each arrival came through a document: a physician’s treatise, a newspaper report, a consensus statement, a WHO list. This page follows those documents in order, from the first detailed European account in 1683 to the regulation of practice today, and reports what each said. What the trials have found since is the subject of the evidence section.

Seventeenth-century accounts

The first European reports came from Japan. Lara Wendel of the German Museum of Medical History in Ingolstadt, in a 2025 article in Bayerisches Ärzteblatt, dates them to Jesuit missionaries there in the late 16th century, who saw acupuncture the Japanese had taken over from the Chinese. Fuller treatises followed in the 17th century, written, as Frederick Kao put it in WHO’s magazine World Health in December 1979, by two surgeons employed by the Dutch East India Company. One was Willem ten Rhijne, who met acupuncture in the company’s service, according to Wendel. His Dissertatio de arthritide, with a section de acupunctura, was printed in London in 1683. Robert Carrubba and John Bowers, writing in 1974, called it the Western world’s first detailed treatise on acupuncture, and Wendel credits ten Rhijne with coining the word acupuncture. Donald and Gary Lu’s 2013 history in Medical Acupuncture names another early account, by the German physician Engelbert Kaempfer (1651–1716). The reception was cool. Wendel quotes the surgeon Lorenz Heister, whose 1719 textbook described the operation only for completeness because it was not in use among Europeans.

Paris and London in the nineteenth century

Acupuncture was taken up in France first. Lu and Lu record that Louis Berlioz, a French physician, treated a woman for stomach pain with acupuncture in 1810, and that the Paris Medical Society then looked into it. Kao writes that acupuncture was popular for a variety of diseases in France and elsewhere in Europe through the 19th century, that the French Académie des Sciences appointed a commission to study it, and that Gustaf Landgren presented a doctoral thesis on it at Uppsala in 1829. The historian Roberta Bivins traces the route into Britain: acupuncture was in use in the great hospitals of Paris before it was transmitted again to Britain, where the Lancet, the BMJ and other journals reported its use. The London surgeon James Morss Churchill published A Treatise on Acupuncturation in 1821, describing it as an operation peculiar to the Japanese and Chinese and now introduced into European practice, and followed it in 1828 with cases of rheumatism, lumbago and sciatica. In the United States, Lu and Lu cite Franklin Bache, who tried it on prisoners and reported in 1826, and William Osler, whose 1892 textbook recommended it for acute lumbar pain. Kao records that interest subsided in the late 19th century.

Soulié de Morant and the French revival

The revival began in France with George Soulié de Morant, a French diplomat who had served in China. In Kao’s account, Soulié de Morant saw patients recover after acupuncture while investigating a cholera epidemic, translated much of the Chinese medical literature on his return, and, not being a physician, was later persecuted by medical colleagues. His L’acuponcture chinoise, which the Wellcome Collection’s catalogue records as published by Mercure de France from 1939 in parts on energy, points and meridians, the handling of energy, the points and their symptoms, and diseases and their treatment, quotes many Chinese and Japanese works in translation. Lu and Lu date the growth of acupuncture in France to the late 1920s and particularly after 1934. Kao describes the revival spreading to Germany, Austria and Scandinavia, and Wendel notes that a German medical society for acupuncture was founded in Munich in 1951.

1971: a reporter’s appendix

In the United States, acupuncture had been practised in Chinese communities for over a century, Kao writes, but the wider interest started with a newspaper report. James Reston of the New York Times had his appendix removed in Beijing in July 1971, while the United States and China were reopening relations. His account, which Kao dates to 25 July 1971 and cites under the heading “Now About my Operation in Peking”, described needles inserted after the operation into the outer part of his right elbow and below his knees to relieve pressure and distension. E. S. Yang and colleagues, in a 2011 review in Pflügers Archiv, write that the report ran on the front page and that the relief came within an hour. Lu and Lu add that President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 drew further attention, and that the first two surgical operations in the United States using acupuncture anaesthesia were performed that year at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

The 1997 NIH consensus statement

In 1997 the US National Institutes of Health convened a consensus conference on acupuncture, published as a statement in JAMA the following year. A 12-member panel with no federal or advocacy role heard 25 experts over two and a half days before an audience of 1,200, and had a bibliography of 2,302 references drawn from literature published between 1970 and October 1997. It concluded that many studies gave equivocal results because of their design and size, and that appropriate controls such as sham acupuncture were hard to devise. It found promising results showing efficacy in adult nausea and vomiting after surgery and chemotherapy and in pain after dental surgery. For addiction, stroke rehabilitation, headache, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, low back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome and asthma, it said acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct or an acceptable alternative. An American Academy of Family Physicians summary of the statement adds two of its other findings: that the incidence of adverse effects is substantially lower than for many drugs, and that a majority of US states licensed or registered acupuncture practitioners. The evidence pages on nausea after surgery and sham acupuncture cover what later trials found.

WHO’s lists

The WHO held an interregional seminar on acupuncture, moxibustion and acupuncture anaesthesia in Beijing in June 1979, attended by 15 participants from 12 countries. R. H. Bannerman, reporting on it in the same December 1979 issue of World Health, printed the provisional list of diseases the seminar drew up as lending themselves to acupuncture. He stated that the list was based on clinical experience, not necessarily on controlled clinical research, and that the inclusion of a disease did not indicate how effective acupuncture was for it.

WHO returned to the question in 2003 with a review of reports on controlled clinical trials. As Ferreira and Luiz summarise it in a 2013 paper in Chinese Medicine, that review sorted conditions into tiers: those for which acupuncture had been proved through controlled trials to be effective, among them headache, low back pain and vomiting; those for which an effect had been shown but further proof was needed, among them asthma; and those for which acupuncture might be tried by a practitioner with modern medical knowledge and adequate monitoring equipment, among them convulsion. Neither list is a clinical guideline; Clinical guidelines covers what guideline bodies recommend.

Dry needling

A second route into Western practice runs through physiotherapy. A 2014 review by James Dunning and colleagues defines dry needling as inserting the thin solid needles used in acupuncture without injecting anything, in contrast to the wet needling of injection therapies. In the United States, several state boards of physical therapy defined it narrowly as needling of trigger points in muscle, and Louisiana required at least 50 hours of face-to-face instruction. Dunning’s group pointed out that the trials of the procedure most often call it acupuncture. Kun Zhou and colleagues, writing in Acupuncture in Medicine in 2015, describe acupuncturists questioning whether non-physician health professionals should practise it, find that the two overlap in technique and in some of their theory, and call for a regulatory body to accredit dry needling courses. Dry needling covers the technique.

Regulation today

The WHO’s global report on traditional, complementary and integrative medicine, published in 2025 from a 2023 survey of Member States, records acupuncture as the traditional practice most often provided through formal health services, named by 57 Member States. Of the 106 that replied on the point, 65 had regulations for practitioners of traditional and complementary medicine generally and 40 did not, 17 of which said regulations were being drawn up. How acupuncture is regulated and trained in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, China and elsewhere is set out in Choosing a practitioner.

What the history does not settle

Each document here records what was believed or found when it was written. The 1979 list gave clinical experience as its basis, the NIH statement rests on the literature to 1997, and the 2003 WHO review on the trials available then. AcuiQ indexes the prescriptions that later studies published, each with its citation; the evidence pages report what the systematic reviews of those studies found.