Around one in forty Australians are estimated to be living with COPD, and it’s not a nice condition at all. The causes range from genetic factors, to childhood illnesses, to environmental exposures, to smoking. Common symptoms include coughing, mucous and difficult or laboured breathing. Unsurprisingly, “COPD can interrupt daily activities, sleep patterns and the ability to exercise”.
Research on acupuncture for COPD
Acupuncture is often used for a diverse range of conditions, and the level of scientific studies that are available so far for each particular condition can really vary. I was quite surprised to see that research for acupuncture for COPD has reached the level of an umbrella systematic review. This is two steps up from the individual randomised controlled trials that make up the bread and butter of medical research. After enough of these individual trials are available, researchers can conduct an analytical review, which looks at all of the evidence base so far. Later, if enough of these analytical reviews have been done, they can do an umbrella analytical review, looking at all of the analytical reviews.
The team who did an umbrella systematic review in 2024 concluded:
“Evidence from SRs [systematic reviews] showed that acupuncture is beneficial to lung function, acute exacerbation, 6MWD [6-minute walking distance], mMRC [modified Medical Research Council scale] and CAT [COPD Assessment Test]… Existing evidence indicates that acupuncture can be considered a useful adjunctive therapy for COPD, capable of reducing the frequency of acute exacerbation, mMRC, and CAT, enhance the lung function and exercise capacity. For SGRQ and brog scale, acupuncture should be used selectively. The appropriate use of acupuncture for managing COPD appears to be safe, with no serious adverse events reported.”
And from the point of view of traditional Chinese medicine, I take it as a good sign that the researchers took an interest in which acupuncture points were most often used in the trials. Believe it or not, plenty of acupuncture trials don’t seem to think to mention this. In this case they reported that these were the most frequently used points in the underlying research trials, and discussed how these may interact with lung function and inflammation:
“In the RCTs evaluated in this study, BL13 (Feishu), BL23 (Shenshu), EX-B1 (Dingchuan) and ST36 were the most commonly used acupoints.”
In 2025 a team conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis specifically on acupuncture for acute exacerbation of COPD, have not yet published their full article, but their provisionally accepted article says that:
“Compared with conventional Western medicine alone, acupuncture combined with conventional Western medicine showed greater effectiveness.”
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References
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/chronic-respiratory-conditions/copd
Zeng Q, Liu L, Chen Y, Chen D, Zhou Z, Hu W, Gong S, He B, Qi W, Wang C, Yang Z, Yu S, Zhao L. Efficacy and Safety of Acupuncture in Managing COPD: An Overview of Systematic Reviews. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2024;19:1721-1739, https://doi.org/10.2147/COPD.S464546
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2025.1513888/abstract