Does acupuncture work for pain relief? It’s a question that’s been debated by the medical community for some time, but of late, more and more physicians have come down on the side of supporting it, or at least maintaining that it does no harm. In 1998, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) stated that there was enough evidence to show that acupuncture has beneficial, pain-relieving qualities for adults suffering from postoperative dental pain, the nausea of chemotherapy, lower back pain, headache, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, and carpal tunnel syndrome. There have been several important studies that report acupuncture is effective in reducing chronic pain. Most recently, a study in the Journal of Clinical Pain suggests that people being treated for lower back pain with acupuncture are less likely to gain benefit from treatment if they have low expectations for its effectiveness – an interesting twist to the earlier findings on pain relief. Emotion and attitude seem to have quite an impact on acupuncture’s efficacy. Dr. Felicity Bishop, author of the study, wrote: People who started out with very low expectations of acupuncture – who thought it probably would not help them – were more likely to report less benefit as treatment