Rising to the challenges of evidence-based medicine: a way forward for acupuncture

Evidence-based medicine offers important opportunities and poses critical challenges to the acupuncture profession. Having a clear understanding of what evidence-based medicine is and what it is not is necessary to understanding how the acupuncture field might benefit by adopting evidence-based medicine as its paradigm. This article discusses the need for the acupuncture field to retool its professional, academic, and clinical apparatuses to produce, critically appraise, and use high-quality scientific evidence in order to develop acupuncture as an evidence-based procedure. Development of evidence-based acupuncture procedures, practice guidelines, and research directives may help acupuncture become a standard therapeutic procedure rather than a complement or alternative to conventional medicine.