Does Acupuncture Really Work?

Rick: Let's talk about cancer. If I got cancer, I'm going to have chemotherapy, but I might get acupuncture to prevent the SIP and the chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy that the drugs were causing. Or I might use acupuncture to reduce the toxic effects of the chemotherapy that I'm getting to treat my cancer.

Brent: Welcome to Death Clock. I'm your host, Brent Franson. Today we speak with Doctor Rick Harris about acupuncture. Doctor Harris is an endowed chair in the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute and professor in the Department of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Care in the School of Medicine at the University of California at Irvine. His background is in basic science and clinical research in alternative medicine.

Brent: He has a B.S. from Purdue, a PhD in molecular and cell biology from UC Berkeley, and he has spent his career studying acupuncture, Eastern medicine, and the effect that it can have on issues like chronic pain. We've been wanting to do an episode on acupuncture for quite some time, because it seemed to be one of those modalities from Eastern medicine that was gaining acceptance by the Western medical community.

Brent: And so we wanted to dig in and understand: what is acupuncture? Is it real? Is it not? What is it being used to treat? And most importantly, what is the data that backs it up? Specifically, data in the context of how we think about measuring Western medicine. It turns out there's a lot of data to support the efficacy of acupuncture.

Brent: There's a bunch of different use cases. He's a wonderful guest who's very deep on the topic. Hope you enjoy.

Brent: Doctor Rick Harris, welcome to the show.

Rick: It's good to be here. How are you doing, Brent?

Brent: I'm well. I'm excited for the topic. I've been wanting to do an episode on acupuncture for quite some time, and finding good guests has been hard, but I think we found about as good of a guest as we could find in you. Before we get into all of that, can you just give us a sense of your potted bio, your background?

Rick: Yeah. I'm a PhD, trained in molecular and cell biology. That's what I did my graduate work in, working on ion channel biophysics—these proteins that allow nerve tissue to be excitable. After that, I made a switch into clinical research. For the last 25 years or so, I've been studying chronic pain from a neurobiological perspective.

Rick: Doing different types of brain imaging studies to see how the brain changes with pain. I'm also an acupuncturist, trained in acupuncture along the way. I'm very interested in understanding how acupuncture and other integrative therapies work. I'm currently a professor and endowed chair in the Samueli Integrative Health Institute at UC Irvine.

Rick: And I'm doing a number of trials on different interventions for pain and doing brain imaging on them.

Brent: Before we get into it, let's talk a little bit about Western medicine versus Eastern medicine. Tell me if this is correct: as an outsider looking in, it seems that traditional Western medicine doctors are fairly skeptical of Eastern medicine. We've had conversations on this podcast about skepticism of supplements.

Brent: Western docs tend to be skeptical of the constellation of things that we might think of as Eastern medicine. And the practitioners of Eastern medicine tend to be skeptical in the other direction—they tend to be skeptical of Western medicine. It seems there's not a lot of crossover between the two; the overlap in the Venn diagram there is fairly limited.

Brent: You seem to be an exception to that rule, where you're saying, "Hey, I think we're seeing some things that are exciting in Eastern medicine, and I'm going to take a Western medicine approach through RCTs or randomized controlled trials and imaging brains to prove that some of that works." Would you agree with that broadly, that there's tension and not a lot of overlap between those two camps, or how would you characterize it?

Rick: The way I have come to look at it is there's one human body. We each have a human body, and there are different ways of expressing illness in that body as well as different ways of treating those illnesses. It's no different than if you go to a different country—there are different words for the same biological structures in different languages.

Rick: Many times when you have someone from another country coming to your country, there's difficulty communicating because you're using different languages. There are definitely areas where there's tension, as you say, but then there are also areas of synergy and areas where the overlap gives you new information that you didn't have when operating separately.

Rick: The same thing is true for Eastern and Western medicine. Western medicine tends to be more reductionist. We're in a very molecular and cellular age, dissecting apart different organs from the body and seeing those organs operate separately because you can surgically remove them. That's the mindset of Western medicine.

Rick: Whereas Eastern medicine looks at it more from a functional perspective. It's a different language. There are going to be instances of things lost in translation and arguments, but there's also a lot of interesting areas where there can be synergy because they are ultimately both trying to study the same body. We're both trying to understand the same person.

Rick: There are just different ways of expressing that. That's my take on it. Has there been pushback on both sides? Agreed, for sure. There are definitely those in the Western medicine field who don't believe that acupuncture is anything more than a placebo effect, for example. And there are definitely lots of acupuncturists who feel like the reductionist approach of Western biomedicine does not capture the whole person or the whole health of somebody who's ailing.

Rick: So, that's my perspective.

Brent: It seems to me the humble approach for both sides to take is that we're probably wrong in a bunch of different areas, as we have been throughout the course of practicing medicine. No matter which angle we come at it from, we should try to figure out where we're wrong as quickly as we can.

Brent: Neither side has a perfect track record. Let's talk about acupuncture specifically, because everybody will have in their mind some sense of what acupuncture is. I picture somebody laying down with thin needles coming out of their skin, and there'll be some level of discomfort simply because needles are involved.

Brent: But how would you define what acupuncture is? What is it? What isn't it?

Rick: Acupuncture can involve needles being inserted into specific parts of the body called acupoints. From an Eastern medical perspective, these points act like regulatory junctions for how energy flows in the body. It's an energetic perspective, and they call it Qi—or energy in the body.

Rick: From an Eastern perspective, that Qi flows, and if it doesn't flow well, you get illness. If there's a deficiency, you have too little; if you have an excess, you have too much. You want to try to have a balanced flow. You can think of it like water in a river.

Rick: When you insert a needle at the point and activate it, you can regulate the flow of that energy—upregulating or downregulating it depending on what's needed. From a Western biomedical perspective, we don't really know what an acupoint is. We don't have a good structural understanding. Maybe they aren't structural things; maybe they're just functional representations.

Rick: From a Western biomedical approach, we still haven't defined what an acupoint is. That's the 800-pound gorilla in the room, because we're claiming that the acupuncturist works this way, but we don't have a good handle on what the acupoint actually is. I'm involved in NIH grants now—a project called TARA (Topological Atlas and Repository for Acupoint Research).

Rick: That's specifically what we're doing: trying to understand what acupoints are with an MRI map of the body, overlaid onto micro-millimeter dissections of a human body, mapping where the points are and tying that information to clinical research and trials. Either way, acupuncture involves those needles going into those points, but it doesn't have to.

Rick: There are styles of acupuncture where the needle doesn't even penetrate the skin. This is called Toyohari acupuncture in Japan, where the acupuncturist holds the needle above the skin without touching, which supposedly activates the point. There's also pressure—you can do acupressure with your fingers or a device on the body to activate the point.

Rick: Those points can be stimulated electrically by running current through the needles. You can warm them with hot moxa, or moxibustion, getting heat into the body through the warmth of the needle. In Korea, for example, they inject chemical or herbal preparations into the acupoints.

Rick: They commonly use venom to inject into the point to activate it. Acupuncture is a very heterogeneous modality; just like all clinical practices, there's a lot of variability.

Brent: Just to ground us, it's worth touching on what acupuncture is used for and, more importantly, the clinical trial data we have around it. A common first reaction when someone hears "acupuncture" or "the flow of Qi" in the context of Western medicine is skepticism—thinking it doesn't work and that it's just placebo.

Brent: You've done a lot of work conducting randomized controlled trials and brain imaging, and those results have been pretty strong. Maybe we can touch on the common use cases for acupuncture. I assume you're focused on chronic pain and fibromyalgia, but what are the common use cases?

Brent: And then how strong is the Western style clinical data around those use cases?

Rick: There has been a lot of research in acupuncture. On PubMed, where clinical and basic science studies are published, if you type in "acupuncture," you'll find around 40,000 papers. Acupuncture is used predominantly in the West for chronic pain—that's one of the main conditions Westerners have adopted it for.

Rick: In China, Korea, or Japan, many conditions are treated with acupuncture, not just pain: hypertension, sleep, fatigue, GI issues, allergies, and more. When I learned acupuncture, they taught us many different conditions it can be used for.

Rick: In the West, it's predominantly pain. What's the data on it? Well, there have been tons of clinical trials of acupuncture for pain. For the ones that are well-powered with larger patient groups, they show a clear difference between acupuncture and usual care. Acupuncture is better than doing what you're usually doing for your pain.

Rick: If you compare acupuncture versus sham or placebo acupuncture in studies with enough patients, you often find that acupuncture is more effective for chronic pain. That's what the clinical trial data shows. There's even stronger data coming from the mechanistic side of things.

Rick: With basic science research, I've been fortunate to look at how acupuncture affects the brain. There are clear differences: acupuncture needling can almost rewire different brain networks from a maladaptive state into a healed state. There are effects on neurotransmission—both excitatory and inhibitory neurotransmitters—as well as effects on inflammation.

Rick: It reduces inflammatory cytokines, which contribute to pain. There's a long list of research in acupuncture, and I encourage anyone interested to look into it. Acupuncture alters many physiological processes in the body, and we're just now beginning to understand all of them.

Rick: The human body has been around for hundreds of thousands of years. To think that we know everything happening in our bodies is the wrong stance. We have to approach it from an inquisitive perspective and realize there's a lot going on that we may not fully understand yet.

Brent: What you're seeing in studies of acupuncture within a randomized controlled trial—comparing a placebo group getting sham acupuncture to a group getting real acupuncture—is meaningful differences between those two groups. And when you look at brain imaging, you can see pre- and post-treatment differences from acupuncture.

Brent: Are you also running sham acupuncture with brain imaging to show that it's not just a placebo effect?

Rick: Yes, many times you'll insert the needle at a non-acupuncture point to observe whether the effect at the acupoint occurs when needling off-point or at a different acupoint. There are clear differences in the brain's response to acupoint stimulation versus non-acupoint stimulation, and even between two different acupoints.

Brent: Do you feel acupuncture has broad applicability? In the US, we're primarily focused on chronic pain through Western studies. But if it has uses for GI issues, sleep, depression, and fatigue, do you think that with enough funding and time, studies would show a clear difference between placebo and acupuncture across all those dimensions?

Rick: There have been trials comparing acupuncture versus sham acupuncture for depression, IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), and GI issues like constipation and diarrhea to see if they differ from placebo. I will say that sham and placebo treatments are not entirely inert.

Rick: When you stick a needle anywhere in the body, you get a physiological response. The task is to see whether the response from acupoint stimulation differs from a control location. That's where the nuance comes in; some fields show a clear difference while others haven't gotten there yet. That's the current state of the research.

Brent: To ask it differently: is there a set of ailments someone might pitch acupuncture for where you'd say, "No, acupuncture won't help with that"? Take an extreme example, like a broken arm—acupuncture won't fix that. But what about sleep? Would you put sleep on the list of conditions you'd personally recommend acupuncture for?

Brent: It would like, would you put sleep on the list of something that you personally would recommend acupuncture for?

Rick: It's really interesting: when I treat patients for pain, it's not uncommon for them to say, "My back pain is better, but I'm also sleeping much better, and eating doesn't give me as much indigestion." It's common to see what we call collateral benefits.

Rick: We published a paper on collateral benefits through the Society for Acupuncture Research. In Western medicine, you take a drug for a condition and unfortunately it often causes side effects. In acupuncture, the opposite happens: you receive treatment for a primary condition, but other things improve as well.

Rick: Other things get better as a collateral benefit. Clinicians see it in patients, and I believe it's real. You rarely get negative side effects with acupuncture; it's very rare for needling to exacerbate a condition.

Rick: They cause a side effect that's very rare.

Brent: Is there anything on the "not for that" list? Schizophrenia, allergies, or something else? What conditions might acupuncturists offer treatment for where it's actually not a good fit?

Brent: And actually, it's it's not a good fit for those things.

Rick: Going back to the broken arm example: if I broke my arm, I wouldn't treat it with acupuncture first. I'd go to a Western doctor to get it set, put on a cast, and take pain medication. But if I kept having pain, if it didn't heal right, or if the medication made me drowsy, I could use acupuncture for the lingering pain.

Rick: Acupuncture won't fix the bone, but it can work on the nervous system to reduce the accompanying pain. There are conditions where I wouldn't prescribe acupuncture for the primary issue, but it can still help with associated problems around it.

Rick: Your body has a strong way of inhibiting pain, and acupuncture can tap into those pain-inhibitory pathways to reduce discomfort. Take cancer, for example: if I had cancer, I'd get chemotherapy, but I might use acupuncture to prevent chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy or reduce the toxic side effects and debilitating fatigue from treatment.

Rick: I wouldn't use acupuncture to reduce a tumor, but I would use it to support other aspects of the healing process. I would be hard-pressed to find a case where acupuncture is entirely useless.

Rick: Yeah. So that's that's what I would say. There's, I would be hard pressed to find a case where acupuncture would be just like, useless.

Brent: What about preventative care or general health? If nothing is wrong with me, but I want to be as healthy as possible and am willing to get acupuncture weekly, would you recommend that for someone with the time and interest?

Rick: That's actually how acupuncture originally evolved in ancient China thousands of years ago—as a tune-up, much like getting a haircut. You would visit the acupuncturist every few months to prevent serious illness later on.

Rick: That's a prospective approach. In the West, the mindset is reactive: you don't go to the doctor unless something is broken.

Rick: It's like servicing a car: I get my Toyota tuned up every 5,000 miles so it doesn't break down at 50,000 miles on a long trip. Western biomedicine focuses on fixing you only after you're broken.

Brent: If you could wave a magic wand and instil a habit in society, would you say acupuncture is like getting your teeth cleaned—something you do a few times a year proactively to avoid issues in the first place, as well as reactively when an issue pops up?

Brent: But preventatively, you know, that's a very good use case.

Rick: Yes, that's how it was developed. Most Western research has been reactive—treating people who are already ill—so very little research has explored this prospective, preventative approach, even though that's its origin.

Brent: On the reactive side, what does treatment look like? How many needles are used, and how often do you go for chronic pain or sleep? How long are the sessions, and how much time is between them?

Rick: The choice of needles is an art form: you might use as few as 1 or 2 needles, or as many as 20 or 30, depending on the acupuncturist and the patient's presentation. I usually see someone 5 or 6 times over a month and a half or two months to gauge if it's having an effect.

Rick: For long-standing chronic conditions, you need multiple sessions—perhaps eight sessions over two months. After stopping, you might not need another treatment for a year, though some patients require ongoing maintenance therapy. Acute conditions resolve much faster.

Rick: If someone has only had pain for a month, one to three sessions might be all that's needed to resolve it completely before it becomes chronic. Catching it early requires fewer treatments and yields better resolution.

Rick: The quicker you are catching it before it becomes chronic, the less treatments you're going to have and the more resolution it will be.

Brent: And how long are these treatments?

Rick: Usually 30 to 40 minutes. The patient speaks with the acupuncturist for 10 to 30 minutes, lies on the table, and the needles are placed over 3 or 4 minutes.

Rick: The needles rest in place for about 20 minutes before being removed. You may also receive cupping, glass work, or acupressure.

Brent: What is gua sha?

Rick: It involves taking a jade stone and rubbing it on the body to relax muscles and prevent knots from forming.

Brent: How much discomfort is involved? I haven't done acupuncture in a long time. It didn't hurt like a flu shot, but there were moments of discomfort where it hit a spot and caused a ringing sensation. How much discomfort is typical?

Brent: I don't know how to describe it, but how how much discomfort is there?

Rick: In the Chinese style, when the needle reaches the point, you often get a sensation called De Qi—an achy, heavy, or mild electrical sensation. That sensation shows the nervous system is engaged, but it dissipates quickly.

Rick: Often, you don't even feel the needle entering the skin. You only feel the De Qi response when the nervous system activates. Japanese styles use much lighter stimulation compared to Chinese styles.

Rick: You only feel that she responds when, the nervous system has been activated and you get that, electrical sensation. So, many times you don't feel anything but that she response is what people typically get. You don't get so much chee in the Japanese styles, but in the Chinese styles, you get a lot of that chee sensation.

Brent: Do you think the stronger the De Qi sensation, the better it works? Is there a correlation?

Rick: We just completed an NIH-funded study looking at the somatosensory components of needling—the sensation of De Qi. We compared active needling to a sham control group that believed they were receiving laser acupuncture, but the laser was turned off.

Rick: The control group had no somatosensory input, but all other contextual elements were identical—the patient-practitioner relationship, discussing the condition, lying on the table. We observed massive differences in brain activity.

Rick: There was a clear difference in brain network communication and GABAergic neurotransmission in the active group that was absent in the sham control group. The somatosensory component plays a key role, with the primary somatosensory cortex mediating much of that response.

Brent: Assuming this works in a clinically meaningful way, what do we think is happening biologically when acupuncture is effective?

Rick: Organisms evolved self-regulating systems to heal from physical intrusion or damage. Acupuncture taps into these self-regulatory pathways.

Rick: From a Western perspective, research by Helene Langevin shows that twisting the acupuncture needle winds surrounding connective tissue, altering gene expression and translation in local fibroblasts.

Rick: The peripheral nervous system is engaged as well. For instance, stimulating Pericardium 6 on the wrist engages the median nerve, sending signals up through the nervous system to the brain.

Rick: Brain imaging (MRI and PET scans) indicates that acupuncture remaps neural pathways, bypassing maladaptive connections to promote healing. Since acupuncture treats more than just pain, it taps into several distinct biological mechanisms.

Rick: And there's definitely lots of different mechanisms that acupuncture taps into.

Brent: If someone signs up for six sessions for pain or sleep, will they dread the third session? Is it uncomfortable, or is it mostly just initial nervousness before the first appointment that goes away once they realize it's fine?

Brent: It's something you got to get through and then you feel better afterwards. Or I'm just going to be nervous before the first session because it's needles and I don't really know what I'm getting into. And then I'm going to say, oh, I was nervous for no reason.

Rick: It's usually the latter. People equate acupuncture needles with hypodermic needles used for blood draws, which are much larger and more invasive. Patients are often nervous before their first treatment, but they usually leave feeling deeply relaxed and noticeably better.

Rick: If a patient experiences strong discomfort, the acupuncturist will adjust their technique to keep the treatment comfortable.

Rick: And so so it's not as uncomfortable for the patient.

Brent: How much does the practitioner matter? Are some significantly better than others, and how can someone tell the difference between a good practitioner and a bad one?

Rick: In large German clinical trials led by Claudia Witt studying thousands of pain patients, researchers evaluated whether practitioner experience correlated with patient outcomes. Surprisingly, years of experience showed little direct correlation with the degree of pain relief in standard trials.

Rick: However, clinical trials don't capture real-world complexity. For complex patients with multiple conditions, a more experienced acupuncturist will likely offer better care.

Rick: As for safety: severe complications like pneumothorax from punctures are extremely rare. In the US, the NCCAOM (National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine) credentials practitioners. Passing their board exams ensures the provider is trained and safe.

Rick: And but it's extremely rare. But it is one of the things that can happen if you needle on the back and you go perpendicularly into the back, that's something you obviously want to avoid. And in the US, we have, an organization called the National, the National Center for Complementary and Acupuncture and Real Medicine. Incom, and that that body credentials are licenses.

Rick: You can visit nccaom.org and use their "Find a Practitioner" tool to locate a licensed acupuncturist in your area.

Rick: Most often you'll find a licensed practitioner in your zip code that will be able to provide treatment, and they'll be safe. And do well.

Brent: Is needle placement determined by the condition being treated? For instance, placement on the thigh for sleep or on the back for hypertension? Is there a precise mapping based on diagnosis?

Rick: Yes, point selection follows specific clinical frameworks. An acupuncturist evaluates symptoms, lifestyle, sleep, and diet to identify underlying patterns or syndromes.

Rick: In Traditional Chinese Medicine, diagnostic patterns like "Kidney Deficiency" or "Liver Yang Rising" guide point selection.

Rick: Alternatively, a musculoskeletal approach focuses directly on local trigger points, affected channels, or nerve pathways along radiating pain patterns.

Rick: So there definitely is theory behind how to choose the points. And to some degree it's almost an art form still about, how to choose the points.

Brent: If someone is hesitant about needles, is acupressure a comparable alternative? Applying pressure to the same points instead of inserting needles—is that an effective starting step?

Rick: Acupressure is a great self-care option. Patients can learn point selection and techniques through mobile apps and guided video tutorials without needing in-person clinic visits.

Rick: In a study published in JAMA Network Open led by Dr. Susan Zick at the University of Michigan, we provided tablets loaded with an acupressure app to ovarian cancer survivors experiencing cancer-related fatigue. Self-administered acupressure significantly reduced their fatigue.

Rick: Acupressure is effective, inexpensive, and gives patients control over pressure intensity and session timing without requiring needles. It's especially useful for pediatric or elderly populations sensitive to needling.

Rick: There's a lot of control that the patient has using acupressure and then that. Then the practitioner doesn't have to do so much work. So now the acupuncturist could then instead of treating one patient, can treat maybe 10 to 15 patients with acupressure and monitor how they're doing without having to insert needles into everyone. So it offloads some of the work of the acupuncture.

Rick: So, yeah, I do think acupressure is beneficial for some people. It's often used in the elderly, and also in the incense. So populations where the needling can be more painful.

Brent: What do you see next for Eastern modalities integrating into Western care? Acupuncture crossed that bridge, and psychedelics seem to be following a similar path toward mainstream medical acceptance. What other Eastern or traditional practices are you excited about?

Brent: So what's your sense of maybe what is currently crossing that bridge? What is next across the bridge? What are you excited about? But you can use a different analogy if you like my bridge analogy, but.

Rick: The next frontier is true clinical integration—practitioners fluent in both paradigms choosing combined therapies. In China, integrative hospitals offer Eastern and Western medicine side by side, with teams collaborating on patient care.

Rick: That dual approach—such as using acupuncture to manage chemotherapy side effects during active cancer treatment—will become far more common.

Rick: And I think just more and more of it's going to happen as we, more integrate fully. And we may have the emergence of a new type of medical profession, even, someone who's, like, able to do both, both types of treatments. In the same office visit at the same time with the same patient. Anyway, so I think that's, down the, that's that's coming now, it's already here to some degree.

Rick: And I think it's going to just get more and more prevalent.

Brent: We experienced this recently. When our child was born three and a half months ago, we learned right before delivery that he was breech. Our OB—a conventional Western medicine doctor—suggested acupuncture using heat near the toe.

Brent: She performed the treatment along with inversions, and by the next morning, the baby had flipped into the proper position.

Brent: And it does seem there's some data to suggest that this can be helpful for babies who are who are breech. You know, just a recent example of, oh, it's a Western medicine doctor is saying, yeah, go, go, go get acupuncture.

Rick: That treatment is called moxibustion. Warming moxa at the BL67 point on the outer edge of the pinky toe stimulates fetal turning. When performed within the proper clinical window, research confirms it can be very effective.

Rick: And that can revert the fetus. So it's no longer in the opposite direction, but that can only be done in a certain window of time. Like you can't do it too early or too late. There's a specific window of time where that treatment works, but it is effective if you do it right.

Brent: And then what are you what are you most excited about? Next. That is that is, you know, you're obviously excited about the marriage of these two worlds and the benefits that can come from that. And that does seem like the best case scenario to me. These worlds are not mutually exclusive. We know that Western medicine has made some really incredible progress.

Brent: If you looked forward 50 years, what traditional practice would you bet will become fully integrated into Western medicine?

Brent: What would you bet on as being, I don't know, the next acupuncture. The thing from eastern medicine that, Western medicine will adopt that we'd be surprised by in the year 2026, but wouldn't be surprised by in the year 2075.

Rick: Acupuncture is already established. On the immediate horizon, the psychedelic renaissance will reshape mental health care. Compounds like psilocybin promote neuroplasticity, allowing neural circuits to rewire.

Rick: Like, I think the psychedelic renaissance that we're in is something that I think is going to reshape how we treat mental health, and maybe other types of health as well. Definitely the the effect that psychedelics tend to change the plasticity of the brain and rewire systems and its actions seem to be very, very provocative and very strong and powerful.

Rick: Indigenous and shamanic traditions have used substances like peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin for millennia. Modern medicine is now re-evaluating them through rigorous clinical trials for conditions like treatment-resistant depression.

Rick: And I think they will be more mainstream. And we'll see. We'll see if the, the randomized controlled trials of like, for example, psilocybin for depression, which are now like being taken that they're now being done. We'll see where those clinical trials show. We'll see if psychedelics are more than a placebo. I suspect that we'll have that be more common in the next 20 years.

Brent: And then lastly, if we want more information, you know, where where can we where can we go? Where would you point us if we're curious and we just want to learn more?

Rick: For research on East Asian medicine, visit the Society for Acupuncture Research (sarcouncil.org). The NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) also offers great evidence-based resources.

Rick: To find a certified provider, use the practitioner search at nccaom.org to find licensed acupuncturists nearby.

Brent: Doctor Rick Harris, thank you so much for your work, and thank you so much for the time.

Rick: You bet my pleasure.

Brent: Death Clock is recorded in Boulder, Colorado and San Francisco, California. Produced by Patrick Gudino, music by Patrick Lee, and hosted by Brent Franson, founder and CEO of Death Clock.