Evidence-Informed Acupuncture in Auckland

There are clinics that will tell you acupuncture can help with almost anything. We’d rather tell you what the evidence actually shows.

At Dr Vitalis Acupuncture in Auckland, we’ve spent over 30 years treating pain, supporting fertility, and helping people through some of the harder chapters of their health including recovery from cancer treatment. What’s changed in that time isn’t just our experience. It’s the evidence. Acupuncture is now one of the most extensively studied natural therapies in the world, and the picture research paints today is both more precise and more fascinating than the old idea of simply “unblocking energy.”

We use ultra-fine pain-free sterile needles, low-level laser therapy, and electro-acupuncture, tailored to what actually works for you.

Demystifying Is Acupuncture, really?

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture is described as a way of restoring the flow of qi (pronounced “chee”) through the body’s meridians. Qi is often mistakenly translated as “energy”. A closer meaning is that qi represents your body’s functions, and a “blockage of qi” is really a functional disruption: in your nervous system, your circulation, your hormones. Acupuncture works by stimulating specific points on the body to restore those functions.

Much of the modern confusion around qi actually traces back to one person: Soulie de Morant, a French diplomat who lived in China from 1901 to 1917 and became one of the first Westerners to bring acupuncture and its accompanying vocabulary back to Europe. His translations shaped how the West has talked about acupuncture ever since, for better and worse.

Acupuncture’s acceptance has grown steadily since: it’s now built into hospital pain clinics, sports medicine units, and treatment guidelines worldwide, including battlefield acupuncture, which the US military trains combat medics to use for rapid pain relief in the field.

What the Research Actually Shows

Needle insertion activates peripheral nerves, prompting the brain and spinal cord to release the body’s own pain-relieving chemicals like endorphins, enkephalins, adenosine and many others. It increases local blood flow, helping deliver oxygen and immune cells to injured tissue. And it shifts the nervous system out of “fight or flight” and into “rest and digest”, part of why so many patients drift off during treatment.

None of this is speculative. A 2018 update to the Acupuncture Trialists’ Collaboration’s individual patient data meta-analysis, pooling data from over 20,000 patients, found that acupuncture has a clinically meaningful effect on chronic pain that persists over time, and can’t be explained by placebo alone (Vickers et al., Journal of Pain, 2018). Cochrane’s most recent review of acupuncture for chronic low back pain reached a similarly measured, positive conclusion (Mu et al., Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 2020).

We’re upfront that acupuncture isn’t a cure-all, and the research reflects that too. It works better for some conditions than others, and like most medical modalities it is best applied as part of a wider plan rather than in isolation.