Acupuncture Video Statistics

Key takeaways

1. Acupuncturists and acupuncture clinics posted 17.9% of YouTube’s 464 most-viewed ‘acupuncture’, ‘cupping therapy’ and ‘acupuncturist’ videos but drew 3.9% of their views, 2.6% without the biggest such channel; acupuncturists that name a U.S. place drew 0.7% (our read, Nov 2026). (Mark Studios) See details
2. ASMR and treatment-experience creators drew 35.9% of those views, and videos of 60 seconds or less drew 89.3%. (Mark Studios) See details
3. Of 37 location pages from seven U.S. acupuncture brands, 2.7% showed a video a visitor can play (our read, Nov 2026). (Mark Studios) See details
4. Original Medicare allowed 347,528 acupuncture services in 2024, up from 89,371 in 2020, the first year it covered acupuncture for chronic low back pain. The 539 individual billers in CMS’s provider-level file spanned 28 provider types and no acupuncturists, because Medicare cannot pay licensed acupuncturists directly (our calculation from CMS data). (CMS, Mark Studios) See details
5. Employers had 7,830 wage and salary acupuncturists in May 2025, at a median annual wage of $76,040, 49.2% above the median for all occupations; BLS estimates that 46.2% of all acupuncturist jobs are held by the self-employed. (BLS) See details
6. Florida had 900 payroll acupuncturists in May 2025, the third most among states with published estimates, and 2,495 practicing acupuncturist licences on November 4, 2026: 316 in Broward, 242 in Palm Beach and 23 in Martin County (our count of the state licence search). (BLS, Mark Studios) See details
7. 2.2% of U.S. adults used acupuncture in 2022, up from 1.0% in 2002, and 72.8% of users used it for pain (NCCIH’s analysis of the National Health Interview Survey). (NCCIH) See details
8. A count of state licence records found 34,524 active acupuncture licences in the U.S. on January 1, 2023, 8.87% fewer than in January 2018. (Journal of Integrative Medicine) See details
9. Veterans using traditional acupuncture through the VA rose 67.2% from 67,461 in fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2019, when 2.1% of VA patients used it. (Journal of General Internal Medicine) See details
10. “Acupuncture” appeared in 11 Form 10-K annual reports filed in 2025, against a peak of 20 in 2011 and 2012 (our count of EDGAR full-text search). (Mark Studios) See details
11. The “3,000 or 5,000 years old” line has no dated source: the 1997 NIH consensus statement said “at least 2,500 years”, the Mawangdui texts sealed in 168 BCE tie the channels to moxibustion rather than needles, a 2011 history concludes needling appeared around 190-176 BC, and the 5,000 form leans on the tattoos of the 5,300-year-old Iceman. (NIH, journals, South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology) See details
12. The WHO list of 43 conditions was drawn up at a 1979 WHO seminar in Beijing; WHO’s 2003 review says the list was not based on formal clinical trials and that only national health authorities can decide what acupuncture should be recommended for. (WHO) See details

Who makes the most-viewed acupuncture videos on YouTube?

Acupuncturists and acupuncture clinics posted 17.9% of the most-viewed acupuncture and cupping videos on YouTube on November 4, 2026, but drew only 3.9% of their views (our count). We read YouTube's own view-sorted search results, the top 200 for each of 'acupuncture', 'cupping therapy' and 'acupuncturist', through the YouTube Data API, with no country filter. The three lists held 464 unique videos from 260 channels with 1,782.9 million lifetime views, and the median video had 552,819.5 views (our count). We sorted all 260 channels by hand from their own titles, descriptions and video text. An acupuncturist here is any channel whose own text offers acupuncture as a service of its practice, or names its owner as an acupuncturist, anywhere in the world; four multi-discipline clinics that list acupuncture are included.

One channel carries a third of the acupuncturists' share. oldtown_acupuncturist, which posts short acupressure tips, holds 34.2% of the class's views; without it, acupuncturists drew 2.6% of the remaining views (our calculation). Most of the acupuncturists' reach comes from those who run their channels for a following, with self-care tips, courses or books: those 16 channels drew 3.2% of all views. The other 17 acupuncturists and clinics, whose channels show their practice to patients, drew 0.7% (our count). The median acupuncturist channel had 15,900 subscribers, against 653,500 for media and viral channels and 772,000 for general creators (our count from channels.list on the same day). Acupuncturists' videos ran 60 seconds or less 63.9% of the time, against 57.8% for the whole sample.

How much of that reach comes from U.S. acupuncturists?

Acupuncturists that name a U.S. place on their channel or in their video text posted 2.4% of the 464 videos on November 4, 2026, from 8 channels, and drew 0.7% of the views (our count). U.S.-placed acupuncturists that do not run creator-style channels posted 4 of the videos. Counting also acupuncturists whose channel country setting is the United States, 14 channels posted 44 videos (9.5%) and drew 2.3% of the views (our count).

One acupuncturist's channel in the sample names a Florida place: Bodhi Traditional Chinese Medicine and Acupuncture ('Located in Melbourne FL'), with one video and 662,956 views (our count). Channels of every kind whose country setting is the United States posted 35.8% of the videos and drew 47.7% of the views; 78 videos came from channels with no country set.

Which kinds of channels drew the views on the most-viewed acupuncture and cupping videos?

ASMR and treatment-experience creators drew the largest share of views in the November 4, 2026 sample, 35.9%, from 21.1% of the videos (our count). The single most-viewed channel, LongKyASMR, a channel with no description and 14 ASMR cupping shorts, drew 20.1% of all views on its own; without it, ASMR and experience creators drew 19.8% of the remaining views and acupuncturists 4.8%. Counting every channel that presents itself as ASMR, whatever its class, 48 channels drew 40.5% of the views (our count). The table gives each class's share of the 464 videos and of their 1,782.9 million views.

Single channels dominate several classes. One orthopaedic surgeon's channel holds 43.0% of the views that other health professionals drew; without it, that class drew 10.9% of the remaining views. One Vietnamese cupping business, KyLong Cupping Therapy, holds 65.0% of the spa, massage and cupping businesses' views (our calculation). Acupuncturists and other licensed health professionals together posted 34.3% of the videos and drew 21.6% of the views. The 14 educator, school and government channels, among them NCCIH, UNESCO and three universities, posted 54 videos but drew under 1% of the views.

The most-viewed video was a 13-second clip titled 'Cupping for Inflammation' on that surgeon's channel, with 130.5 million views, 7.3% of the sample's views (our count). The 10 most-viewed channels drew 64.0% of all views, and the 10 most-viewed videos 39.7%. 60 of the 260 channels had 1 million or more subscribers.

What do the most-viewed acupuncture videos show?

Cupping, not needling, dominates the views: videos that mention cupping or hijama in the title were 44.6% of the 464 videos on November 4, 2026 and drew 84.6% of their views (our count). ASMR wording in the title (ASMR, tingles, no talking) appears on 27.4% of the videos, which drew 44.4% of the views. The counts below are regex matches on video titles (dry needling: titles, descriptions and tags), so they show what the videos announce, not what an editor would find on screen.

None of the 464 videos carried YouTube's altered or synthetic content disclosure field, and no channel said in its own text that its videos are AI-generated (0 videos; our count from videos.list part=status). Uploaders marked 1 video as made for kids, a HiHo Kids episode titled 'Kids Meet an Acupuncturist'. The median video had 9.8 likes per 1,000 views.

How long and how recent are the most-viewed acupuncture videos?

Videos of 60 seconds or less were 57.8% of the 464 videos on November 4, 2026 and drew 89.3% of their views (our count). The median short video had 950,774 views, against 283,294.5 for longer ones, and the median video ran 48.5 seconds. Videos longer than 20 minutes, mostly ASMR treatment sessions, were 15.5% of the videos and drew 3.2% of the views. The sample is recent: 58.6% of the videos were published in 2024 or later and drew 75.1% of the views, and 122 were published in 2026 up to November 4, more than in any earlier year (our count).

What does each search return?

The three searches return different worlds. In the 'acupuncture' list, acupuncturists posted 28.1% of the 171 unique videos and drew 22.5% of their views; in the 'acupuncturist' list they posted 33.5% of the 200 videos and drew 28.1%. In the 'cupping therapy' list they posted 1.5% of the 199 videos and drew 0.6% of the views, while other health professionals drew 20.3%, spa, massage and cupping businesses 16.1% and ASMR and experience creators 40.5% (our count, November 4, 2026). Videos of 60 seconds or less drew 94.0% of the 'cupping therapy' views. In the 'acupuncturist' list, educators, schools and government channels posted 24.0% of the videos but drew 7.5% of the views. 102 videos appeared in two or more lists, 100 of them in both the 'acupuncture' and 'acupuncturist' lists.

What do acupuncture organizations, schools and suppliers post on YouTube?

The 10 organization channels we could confirm posted 372 videos in the year to November 4, 2026, with a median of 246.5 views each (our count). We looked for 14 organizations' channels through links on their own websites (after checking each site's robots.txt) or by YouTube handle and username lookups, and read each channel's uploads for the 365 days to November 4, 2026. Two channels posted most of those videos, Jane, a practice-management software seller, and Pacific College of Health and Science: 89.5% of the uploads between them.

No confirmed channel was found for 4 of the 14 organizations: NCCAOM, the American Society of Acupuncturists, ACAHM (the accreditor formerly named ACAOM) and CCAOM. Handles named after NCCAOM, ACAHM and CCAHM exist but carry no description and no public videos, and the robots.txt files of nccaom.org (which names ClaudeBot and GPTBot) and ccaom.org (which disallows all but a few search crawlers) bar our crawler, so we did not read those sites. NCCIH's 2010 explainer 'What Happens During an Acupuncture Session?' was the only organization video in the search sample, and NCCIH's was the only organization channel with one there (1 of 10). The acupuncturist's creator channel oldtown_acupuncturist had 119,000 subscribers on November 4, 2026, more than the 10 organization channels combined (48,245; our count from channels.list on the same day).

How many acupuncture clinic location pages show a video?

One page in 37: on November 4, 2026, 2.7% of the U.S. clinic location pages of multi-location acupuncture brands showed any video (our count). Mark Studios read every live clinic page of the brands it could find, 37 pages of 7 brands (our count). The one page was WTHN's Upper East Side studio page in New York City, which plays a studio clip. 0.0% embedded a YouTube video and 0.0% played a muted background loop. The brands' homepages use more video: 2 of the 7 homepages played one, WTHN's and Yinova Center's (our count).

This is a read of a few brands' page templates, not of U.S. acupuncturists. Most acupuncturists practise alone or in small single-site practices with no page per clinic, and the brands that publish one are few. Within a brand, most features appear on every page or on none. Pooled shares therefore mostly show which of seven templates carry a feature, and ACA Acupuncture & Wellness supplies 13 of the 37 pages. Counting each brand equally, 2.9% of pages showed a video (our calculation). The 37 pages are in 8 states (our count). 0 were Florida pages: none of the seven brands lists a Florida clinic (our count).

Which acupuncture brands were read, and how many clinic pages does each list?

Seven brands, with 3 to 13 clinic pages each on November 4, 2026. Modern Acupuncture, the franchisor, listed 4 live clinic pages that day (our count). Its sitemap listed 8 clinic pages on November 4, 2026: 4 rendered a clinic with an address, hours and a booking link, and its find-a-location page showed the same 4. The other 4 rendered an empty clinic block and were left out. The other six brands are clinic groups in one or two metro areas. Working Class Acupuncture, a group of Portland community clinics, answered its robots.txt request with a captcha and was not read: 1 of 8 brands found (our count). Mark Studios checked robots.txt for every host before reading any page, read each page once in a headless browser, and opened no forms or booking widgets.

Source: Mark Studios read of each brand's clinic pages, November 4, 2026 (our count). Shares are of that brand's pages.

How do acupuncture brand location pages take bookings?

All of them offer online booking: on November 4, 2026, 100.0% of the 37 pages had a book or appointment link or a booking tool, menus included (our count). 56.8% sent visitors to a named third-party tool (our count): Jane on 24.3% (East-West and Healing Arts), Boulevard on 13.5% (WTHN), Mindbody on 10.8% (Modern Acupuncture) and AcuBliss on 8.1% (Acupuncture Northwest). The other 43.2% sent visitors to an appointment page on the brand's own site (ACA and Yinova). 0 pages used Zenoti, Acuity, Square Appointments, Vagaro, Unified Practice, Calendly, Zocdoc or SimplePractice (our count).

Which social networks do acupuncture brand location pages link to?

Instagram and Facebook, on 78.4% and 78.4% of the 37 pages read on November 4, 2026, the same pages in both cases (our count). Acupuncture Northwest's and WTHN's pages carry no social links. 10.8% linked to YouTube, all of them Modern Acupuncture pages linking to the brand's channel, and 0.0% linked to TikTok (our count).

Do acupuncture location pages show prices, intro offers and insurance?

About a third show intro-offer wording: on November 4, 2026, 35.1% of the 37 pages had a new-client or first-visit offer or price, a free trial or a free consultation (our count, recorded yes or no). Modern Acupuncture's pages carry a first-time customer promotional price. Acupuncture Northwest offers a free phone consultation, four ACA pages a free trial for new or first-time patients, and two WTHN studio pages a first-session price. 27.0% printed a dollar price for a service (our count; amounts not recorded). Counting each brand equally, 38.7% carried intro-offer wording (our calculation).

Insurance appears more often than acceptance. 75.7% of pages mentioned insurance, menus included, but only 43.2% said the clinic accepts it, named accepted plans or was in network (our count). Every ACA page lists accepted insurers and every Acupuncture Northwest page says "most plans accepted". Healing Arts and East-West mention insurance only in menu links, Yinova says it provides paperwork for insurance reimbursement, and the Modern Acupuncture and WTHN pages do not mention insurance. Counting each brand equally, 28.6% said they accept insurance (our calculation). 13.5% mentioned FSA or HSA payment, all of them WTHN pages (our count).

Do acupuncture location pages show licences and services such as cupping?

Most do: on November 4, 2026, 59.5% of the 37 pages printed an acupuncture licence or certification credential in the main text, such as L.Ac., L.OM, Washington's EAMP, Dipl. O.M. or NCCAOM, usually in practitioner bios (our count). Counting each brand equally the share is 64.8% (our calculation). A printed credential says what a page shows, not whether anyone holds a licence.

Service menus repeat on every page of a brand, so these shares mostly say what each brand lists. 75.7% mentioned facial or cosmetic acupuncture or facial rejuvenation, 62.2% cupping and 21.6% telehealth or virtual visits (Healing Arts and Yinova). 2.7% mentioned dry needling: one ACA page lists "Trigger Point Therapy / Dry Needling" (our count). 13.5% showed patient reviews or a review widget, all of them WTHN pages (our count).

In a hand-check of 20 of the pages, drawn at random within each brand, 100.0% of 440 flag values matched a hand reading of the page after the rules were corrected; the first pass matched 432 (our count). Method, exclusions and the per-page file: location-pages.csv.

How many U.S. adults use acupuncture, and how has that changed since 2002?

About 2.2 percent of U.S. adults used acupuncture in the 12 months before their 2022 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) interview, up from 1.0 percent in 2002, according to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). NCCIH, part of the National Institutes of Health, drew both figures from the 2024 JAMA analysis by Nahin, Rhee and Stussman of the 2002, 2012 and 2022 NHIS, the household interview survey of the civilian noninstitutionalized population run by CDC's National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

NCHS's own reports, which age-adjust to the 2000 U.S. population, show a slow, steady climb: 1.1% of adults in 2002 (NCHS Advance Data 343), 1.4% in 2007 (NCHS NHSR 12) and 1.5% in 2012 (NCHS NHSR 79). NCHS classed the 2002-2012 acupuncture trend as linear and statistically significant. In head counts, that is 2,136 thousand adults in 2002, 3,141 thousand in 2007 and 3,484 thousand in 2012, a rise of 63.1% over the decade (our calculation). NCHS's 2017 complementary-health releases covered yoga, meditation and chiropractors only, so there is no 2017 acupuncture figure.

Lifetime use is a different, larger number. NCHS counted 8,188 thousand adults (4.0%) who had ever used acupuncture as of 2002 (NCHS). A secondary analysis of the 2007 survey by Zhang and colleagues put "ever" users at 14.01 million in 2007, up from 8.19 million in 2002 (Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine). Neither figure is a count of people treated in a single year.

Children rarely use it. NCHS estimated 150 thousand U.S. children under 18 (0.2%) used acupuncture in 2007 (NCHS NHSR 12). Its 2015 trend report put 2012 use among children aged 4-17 at 0.1%, an estimate NCHS flags as unreliable because of its large relative standard error (NCHS NHSR 78).

Who uses acupuncture, and what do they use it for?

Pain is the main reason, and its share is growing: 72.8 percent of adult acupuncture users in 2022 used it for pain, up from 55.7 percent in 2002, according to NCCIH's analysis of the NHIS (NCCIH). NCCIH's fact page says acupuncture in the United States is most commonly used for back, joint or neck pain (NCCIH fact page).

Users skew female and middle-aged. In the 2012 NHIS (33,373 respondents), 69.6% of acupuncture users were women and 47.4% were aged 41 to 65, in an analysis by Cui and colleagues (Acupuncture in Medicine). The same paper found the share using acupuncture to treat a specific health problem, rather than for general wellness, fell from 84.7% in 2002 to 55.3% in 2012 (Cui et al.).

In 2002, NCHS asked users why they chose acupuncture. Among 276 adult users in the sample, 44.2 percent said they thought conventional medical treatments would not help, and 24.8 percent said a conventional medical professional had suggested it; respondents could give more than one reason (NCHS Advance Data 343). Among children aged 4-17 who used acupuncture in 2012, 70.1 percent used it to treat a condition, the highest share of any approach NCHS tracked, though the estimate rests on a very small sample (NCHS NHSR 78).

What do Americans pay out of pocket for acupuncture?

U.S. adults spent an estimated 827,336 thousand dollars (about $827 million) out of pocket on visits to acupuncture practitioners in 2007, across 17,629 thousand visits, according to NCHS's cost report on the 2007 NHIS (NCHS NHSR 18). That is the most recent NCHS table that breaks out acupuncture: the 2012 spending report (NHSR 95) gives only totals for all complementary practitioners combined.

The typical user made a median of 2.42 visits that year and paid a median of $122.35 out of pocket in total, or $48.25 per visit (NCHS NHSR 18). Costs varied widely: 32.4 percent of users paid $0 to $24 per visit on average, while 14.9% paid $100 or more (NCHS). These are 2007 dollars and out-of-pocket amounts only; anything an insurer paid is excluded.

How many licensed acupuncturists are there in Florida?

Florida had 2,215 in-state active acupuncturist licences on June 30, 2026, the end of fiscal year 2025-26, by the count of the Florida Department of Health's Division of Medical Quality Assurance (MQA) (Florida DOH MQA annual report). Another 231 active licences were held at out-of-state addresses, and the count across every status (active, inactive, delinquent, military and retired) was 2,952. By our calculation, 9.4% of active licences sat at out-of-state addresses (our calculation). MQA's tables list the licence as Acupuncturist (Board of Acupuncture). These are licences, not people at work.

A search of MQA's public licence lookup on Nov 4, 2026 found 2,495 acupuncturist licences in a practicing status (Clear, Military, Obligations or Probation) (our count), out of 4,781 current and former licences in the search, so 52.2% were practicing (our calculation). The search and the annual report count on different dates and with different status rules, so the two totals differ. A separate Florida registration lets out-of-state acupuncturists treat Florida patients by telehealth: 21 held one in a practicing status (our count).

Licences far outnumber payroll jobs. Florida's practicing licences were 2.8 times the 900 wage and salary acupuncturists BLS counted on Florida payrolls in May 2025 (our calculation). The two count different things: a licence can belong to someone who is self-employed, works part time, practises elsewhere or does not practise, while the payroll count covers only employees.

MQA issued 97 initial acupuncturist licences in fiscal year 2025-26 from 133 applications (Florida DOH MQA), and processed 2,409 acupuncturist renewals that year (MQA Table 6). Over the six fiscal years from 2020-21 to 2025-26 it issued 614 initial licences (our calculation), and the all-status licence count rose 3.4% (our calculation). Licences renew every two years, so the active and delinquent columns rise and fall with the renewal cycle.

Source: Florida DOH MQA Annual Report and Long-Range Plan, Table 1 and Table 4, each fiscal year FY 2020-21, FY 2021-22, FY 2022-23, FY 2023-24, FY 2024-25, FY 2025-26. Out-of-state active licences were 288 at the end of fiscal year 2024-25.

How many acupuncturists are licensed in Palm Beach, Broward and Martin counties?

Broward County had 316 acupuncturist licences in a practicing status on Nov 4, 2026, the most of any Florida county, Palm Beach County had 242 and Martin County had 23 (our count of the Florida Department of Health licence search, one query per county). Together the three counties had 581, or 23.4% of the county-matched practicing licences in the state (our calculation). Miami-Dade had 309 and Orange 238 (our count). 15 of Florida's 67 counties returned no practicing acupuncturist licence (our count).

The search's county filter is not documented and overlaps. On the first result page of each county search, 35 distinct licences appeared under two counties, for example Martin and St. Lucie (our check). The 67 county totals therefore do not add up to the state total, and a licence matched to two of the three counties counts twice in the combined figure. The full county list is in the CSV that accompanies this page.

How many Florida chiropractors and physical therapists add acupuncture or dry needling to their licences?

Florida issued 22 "Acupuncture Added" upgrades to chiropractic physician licences in fiscal year 2025-26 and 36 in 2024-25 (Florida DOH MQA Table 5). In fiscal year 2025-26 it also issued 101 dry needling certifications to chiropractic physicians and 289 "Dry Needling Added" upgrades to physical therapist licences (MQA Table 5). These count upgrades to other professions' licences, not acupuncturists. The rules for physical therapists who dry needle are on the physical therapy statistics page.

How many licensed acupuncturists are there in California, New York, Texas and other states?

California had 10,093 active acupuncturist licences in fiscal year 2024-25, by the California Acupuncture Board's count in the Department of Consumer Affairs annual report (California DCA annual report), plus 1,507 delinquent or expired and 1,400 inactive licences, so 77.6% were active (our calculation). The board issued 277 initial licences and renewed 5,670 that year (DCA), and 62% of the 430 candidates who sat the California Acupuncture Licensing Examination passed (DCA).

New York had 4,170 registered licensed acupuncturists with a New York mailing address on July 1, 2026, 1,022 with an address in another state and 5,221 in total, by the count of the State Education Department's Office of the Professions (NYSED Office of the Professions). That puts 79.9% at New York addresses (our calculation). Queens County had 886, New York County (Manhattan) 728, Nassau 510, Kings (Brooklyn) 507 and Suffolk 432 (NYSED); the five New York City borough counties held 54.1% of the in-state total (our calculation). Mailing address is not necessarily practice address. New York issued 171 acupuncturist licences in 2021, 192 in 2022, 214 in 2023, 197 in 2024 and 199 in 2025 (NYSED).

The Texas Medical Board counted 1,317 licensed acupuncturists in September 2026, 1,032 with a Texas practice address and 285 out of state (Texas Medical Board), so 21.6% practised from outside Texas (our calculation). The count includes licensees whose permits had expired but were not yet cancelled. 909 graduated from a Texas acupuncture school and 911 were women (TMB). Travis County (Austin) had 302 and Harris County (Houston) 210 (TMB acupuncturists by county), together 49.6% of in-state licensees (our calculation).

State open-data licence files give smaller states' counts on Nov 4, 2026 (our counts of each registry's file): Colorado had 1,635 active acupuncturist licences, 86.4% of them with a Colorado mailing address, and separately 448 active chiropractor acupuncture authorities; Washington had 1,622 active acupuncture and Eastern medicine practitioner credentials, and its file also held 1,463 expired ones; Connecticut had 440 acupuncturist credentials flagged active, 73.6% with a Connecticut address; Delaware had 22 active acupuncture practitioner licences.

Each state counts a different licence status on a different date, and many acupuncturists hold licences in more than one state, so these figures should not be added into a national total.

How many acupuncturists are there in the United States?

About 14.8 thousand acupuncturist jobs in 2025, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Projections, which count wage and salary jobs and the self-employed together (BLS Employment Projections). The Occupational Outlook Handbook prints the same estimate as 14,800 jobs, but only on its page of occupations it does not cover in detail; it has no full acupuncturist profile (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook). BLS's survey of employers found 7,830 acupuncturists (SOC 29-1291) on employers' payrolls in May 2025 (BLS OEWS). That survey leaves out everyone who works for themselves, and for an occupation this small its estimate carries a wide margin of error. The Current Population Survey, a monthly household survey that counts people by their main job, found 20 thousand employed acupuncturists in 2025 (BLS Current Population Survey); the estimate is too small for BLS to publish their sex, race or ethnicity.

How many acupuncturists are self-employed?

Almost half: BLS estimates that 46.2 percent of U.S. acupuncturist jobs were held by self-employed workers in 2025 (BLS Employment Projections). That is why the payroll count of 7,830 is so much lower than the 14.8 thousand total. No BLS wage figure on this page includes the self-employed, because BLS's wage survey covers only workers on a payroll.

What do acupuncturists earn?

The median wage and salary acupuncturist in the United States earned $76,040 a year in May 2025, by BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (BLS OEWS). The mean was $87,020 a year (BLS OEWS), or $41.84 an hour (BLS OEWS). Pay is spread wide: one in ten earned less than $38,830 a year (BLS OEWS) and one in ten more than $161,470 (BLS OEWS). The median for all U.S. occupations was $50,980 (BLS OEWS), so the acupuncturist median was 49.2% higher (our calculation). These figures come from BLS's survey of employers, so they say nothing about what self-employed acupuncturists earn.

Where do wage and salary acupuncturists work?

Mostly in practitioners' offices: the industry group offices of other health practitioners (NAICS 6213), which holds acupuncture, chiropractic, physical therapy and other non-physician practices, employed 5,850 of them in May 2025 (BLS OEWS), or 74.7% of the payroll total (our calculation). Colleges, universities and professional schools employed 270 (BLS OEWS) and outpatient care centers 230 (BLS OEWS). BLS did not release a count for offices of physicians.

The setting changes the pay. Acupuncturists in offices of other health practitioners earned a mean of $76,180 a year (BLS OEWS), against $114,900 in outpatient care centers (BLS OEWS), $114,310 in general medical and surgical hospitals (BLS OEWS) and $144,120 in offices of physicians (BLS OEWS), 1.9 times the mean in practitioners' offices (our calculation). The industry estimates rest on small samples, so the gaps are rough.

Which states have the most acupuncturists?

California, by BLS's May 2025 employer survey: 2,520 wage and salary acupuncturists worked there (BLS OEWS). New York had 1,160 (BLS OEWS), Florida 900, Oregon 360 (BLS OEWS), North Carolina 320 (BLS OEWS) and New Jersey 240 (BLS OEWS). That order is our ranking of the published state estimates only: BLS released no acupuncturist employment figure for Texas, Washington, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan, Hawaii, Tennessee and several other states, and no estimate at all for many more.

The highest published state mean wage was Tennessee's $158,380 a year (BLS OEWS), a state whose employment BLS did not release, followed by New Jersey's $129,250 (BLS OEWS). In the two states with the most acupuncturists the mean was $89,810 in California (BLS OEWS) and $88,300 in New York (BLS OEWS).

How many acupuncturists work in Florida, and what do they earn?

Florida employers had 900 wage and salary acupuncturists on their payrolls in May 2025, by BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (BLS OEWS), the third-highest count among the states BLS published and 11.5% of the national payroll count (our calculation). Their median wage was $69,990 a year (BLS OEWS), 8.0% below the national median of $76,040 (our calculation), and their mean $82,750 (BLS OEWS). Acupuncture is a bigger part of Florida's workforce than the nation's: the state's location quotient for the occupation was 1.80 (BLS OEWS), meaning acupuncturists' share of Florida jobs was 1.80 times their share of U.S. jobs. Like the national payroll count, these figures leave out the self-employed, who held 46.2 percent of acupuncturist jobs nationwide in 2025.

BLS publishes no county figures for acupuncturists, and its May 2025 data hold no acupuncturist estimate at all for the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metro area, which takes in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties, or for the Port St. Lucie metro area, which takes in Martin and St. Lucie counties. The practice counts in the next section are the closest local figures.

What is the job outlook for acupuncturists?

BLS projects acupuncturist employment to grow 8.6 percent from 2025 to 2035 (BLS Employment Projections), to 16.0 thousand jobs in 2035 (BLS Employment Projections). That is 1,300 new jobs, a rate the Occupational Outlook Handbook rounds to 9 percent and calls much faster than the average for all occupations (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook). BLS expects an average of 0.8 thousand openings a year over the decade (BLS Employment Projections); BLS's openings figure counts new jobs plus jobs left open by workers who retire or move to other occupations. BLS lists a master's degree as the typical entry-level education. These are model projections, not counts.

Which industry code covers acupuncture practices?

NAICS 621399, Offices of All Other Miscellaneous Health Practitioners, a shared code that includes acupuncture, massage therapy and other practices (2022 NAICS Manual). The 2022 NAICS Manual defines it as independent health practitioners other than physicians, dentists, chiropractors, optometrists, mental health specialists, physical, occupational and speech therapists, audiologists and podiatrists. Acupuncturists' offices (except MDs or DOs) are the first of its illustrative examples, listed with midwives, hypnotherapists, dietitians, dental hygienists, naturopaths, respiratory therapists, homeopaths, denturists and nurses. The manual's index files massage therapists' offices under the same code, 621399 (2022 NAICS Manual), and offices of acupuncturists who are MDs or DOs under 621111, offices of physicians (2022 NAICS Manual). No federal business count isolates acupuncture practices, so every 621399 figure below describes the whole shared code.

How many acupuncture practices are there?

No federal count isolates them. In the shared code NAICS 621399, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages counted an average of 43,733 private establishments with employees in 2025 (BLS QCEW), up from 18,575 in 2015 (BLS QCEW). Those establishments employed an average of 174,667 people in 2025 (BLS QCEW), up from 98,428 in 2015 (BLS QCEW), a rise of 77.5% (our calculation), at an average annual pay of $63,615 (BLS QCEW). QCEW counts only workplaces with jobs covered by unemployment insurance.

The Census Bureau's own counts of the same code are lower. County Business Patterns counted 36,107 establishments with paid employees in 2023 (Census County Business Patterns), and the 2022 Economic Census counted 32,609 employer establishments (Census Economic Census) with $18,332,346 thousand in receipts in 2022 (Census Economic Census). The counts differ in source, timing and definition, so they should not be compared as a trend.

How many businesses in the code have no employees?

259,850 in 2024, far more than the code's employer practices: that is the Census Bureau's Nonemployer Statistics count of businesses with no paid employees in NAICS 621399 (Census Nonemployer Statistics), with $12,892,829 thousand in receipts (Census Nonemployer Statistics). A nonemployer business is a tax filer, not a storefront, so a self-employed acupuncturist renting a room in a shared clinic counts if she files as a business. The count also takes in the massage therapists, dietitians, hypnotherapists and other practitioners who share the code, so it is not a count of acupuncturists.

What do practices in the code bill for?

Patient care, recorded by diagnosis rather than by treatment. Patient care classified by the patient's primary diagnosis made up 97.2 percent of 2022 receipts for employer establishments in NAICS 621399, by the 2022 Economic Census (Census Economic Census). Patients with musculoskeletal and connective tissue diagnoses were the largest diagnosis group, at 15.1 percent of receipts (Census Economic Census). Because health care businesses report receipts by diagnosis, the Economic Census has no product line for acupuncture: none of the product lines it published for NAICS 621399 in 2022 or 2017 names it.

How many practices are there in Florida and in Palm Beach, Broward and Martin counties?

Florida averaged 4,473 private establishments with employees in the shared code NAICS 621399 in 2025, by BLS's Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (BLS QCEW). They employed an average of 15,904 people (BLS QCEW) at an average annual pay of $68,500 (BLS QCEW). Census's County Business Patterns counted 3,956 Florida establishments with paid employees in the code in 2023 (Census County Business Patterns). Businesses with no employees are far more numerous: Nonemployer Statistics counted 29,607 in Florida in 2024 (Census Nonemployer Statistics), with $1,492,953 thousand in receipts (Census Nonemployer Statistics).

Together the three counties held 19.7% of Florida's private establishments with employees in the code in 2025 and 22.3% of its nonemployer businesses in 2024 (our calculations). The county counts cover the whole shared code, so they include massage therapy offices, dietitians, hypnotherapists and other practitioners as well as acupuncture practices. Acupuncture practices run by MDs or DOs are counted with physicians' offices instead.

How much acupuncture does Medicare pay for?

Original Medicare Part B allowed 347,528 acupuncture services in 2024 (CPT 97810, 97811, 97813 and 97814, office and facility settings combined; our calculation from CMS's Physician & Other Practitioners by Geography and Service file). That is 3.9-fold the 89,371 services allowed in 2020 (our calculation), the first year Medicare covered acupuncture for chronic low back pain. Coverage began on 21 January 2020, so 2020 is a partial year and a COVID-19 year. The 2019 file has 0 rows for the initial acupuncture code (CMS 2019 file). Growth slowed to 3.9% between 2023 and 2024 (our calculation).

Multiplying CMS's average Medicare payment per service by the number of services, Original Medicare paid about $10.1 million for acupuncture in 2024, up from about $2.6 million in 2020 (our calculation). The payment excludes the patient's coinsurance and deductible. 98.7% of 2024 acupuncture services were billed in the office (non-facility) setting (our calculation); the facility setting accounted for 1,116 initial-session services (CMS).

These files count only Original Medicare fee-for-service claims. They leave out Medicare Advantage enrollees, hospital outpatient institutional claims, VA, TRICARE, Medicaid and private insurance. CMS also drops any aggregated record built from 10 or fewer beneficiaries (CMS methodology), so small state and setting rows are missing and sums understate the true Part B total.

For the initial 15-minute code in the office setting, the average Medicare allowed amount was $39.42 per service in 2024 (CMS); the allowed amount includes the patient's share, the payment does not. Each beneficiary with an initial session averaged 5.9 initial-session services in the year (our calculation). Provider and beneficiary counts overlap across codes and cannot be added together.

How fast has Medicare acupuncture use grown since 2020?

Beneficiaries who had an initial acupuncture session (CPT 97810) in the office setting rose 51% from 2021 to 2024 (our calculation from CMS's geography files). The table shows each year as CMS published it.

In 2020, 579 providers billed the initial code in the office setting (CMS), against 972 in 2024. The add-on and electrical-stimulation codes were allowed 24,544 times (97811), 18,839 times (97813) and 23,104 times (97814) in 2020 (CMS). The full year-by-code grid, including facility rows, is in our Medicare acupuncture claims CSV.

Who bills Medicare for acupuncture?

Physicians bill most Medicare acupuncture. In 2024, 539 individual providers billed acupuncture codes with enough patients to appear in CMS's provider-level file (our count from the Physician & Other Practitioners by Provider and Service file). Physical medicine and rehabilitation physicians were the largest group at 26.7% of those providers and billed 37.4% of the services (our calculation). Family practice and internal medicine physicians together made up 40.3%, and nurse practitioners and physician assistants 10.4% (our calculation).

CMS's provider-level records span 28 provider types, none of them acupuncturist or chiropractor (our count). Licensed acupuncturists who treat Medicare patients bill through an eligible physician or practitioner, so they do not appear under their own type. The provider-level file drops any provider-code-setting record with 10 or fewer beneficiaries, so it lists fewer billers than the geography file; it still holds 92% of the national acupuncture services (our calculation). Counts by provider type for 2020 to 2024 are in our provider-type CSV; no provider is named.

How much Medicare acupuncture is billed in Florida?

In 2024, 48 Florida providers billed Medicare for an initial acupuncture session in the office setting, for 646 beneficiaries and 3,062 services (CMS Florida rows). The average Medicare payment was $27.81 per initial session (CMS). Across all four acupuncture codes, Florida providers billed 16,073 office-setting services (our calculation), including 2,728 add-on sessions, 4,471 initial electro-acupuncture sessions and 5,812 electro-acupuncture add-ons (CMS).

Florida held 4.3% of the national beneficiaries for the initial code but 3.5% of the services (our calculation): Florida patients averaged 4.7 initial sessions each, against 5.9 nationally. In 2020, Florida's figures were 387 beneficiaries and 1,537 services (CMS). CMS publishes no Florida facility-setting rows, because each would rest on 10 or fewer beneficiaries.

Does Medicare pay for dry needling?

Medicare allowed 2,713 needle-insertion-without-injection services (CPT 20560 and 20561, the dry-needling codes) in 2024, about 0.8% of the needling services counted here (our calculation). CMS's billing instructions for the acupuncture coverage decision list 20560 and 20561 among the codes paid for chronic low back pain; dry needling for any other condition is not covered. In 2024, 251 providers billed 20560 for 1,157 services and 176 providers billed 20561 for 1,464 services in the office setting (CMS). In 2020 the two codes were allowed 629 and 1,218 times (CMS). CMS publishes no Florida rows for these codes in 2024.

How many veterans get acupuncture through the VA?

In fiscal year 2019 (October 2018 to September 2019), 112,826 veterans used traditional acupuncture through the VA, in VA clinics or VA-paid community care, and made 868,728 visits (Taylor et al., Journal of General Internal Medicine). VA researchers counted every veteran using VA health care that year (5,260,921 patients) from electronic records. Users rose from 67,461 in fiscal 2017, an increase of 67.2% in two years (JGIM Table 1). Traditional acupuncture reached 2.1% of VA patients, second only to chiropractic care among the therapies studied (JGIM).

Battlefield Acupuncture, a protocolized ear-needle technique, reached 27,990 veterans in fiscal 2019, with 79,911 visits (JGIM Table 1). A separate VA cohort study found 41,234 patients who received it at 130 VA medical facilities between October 2016 and March 2019 (Thomas et al., Medical Care). In the matched comparison, 9.5% of those patients went on to use traditional acupuncture within three months, against 0.9% of similar veterans who had not received it; the study shows an association, not cause (Medical Care).

VA researchers wrote in 2020 that the VHA had trained over 2,800 providers to deliver Battlefield Acupuncture since 2016 (Giannitrapani et al., Medical Care). The Defense Department's Defense and Veterans Center for Integrative Pain Management gives the same figure, over 2,800 DoD and VA providers, for its joint training program (DVCIPM, Uniformed Services University); the two counts may describe the same trainees. These VA figures cover fiscal 2017 to 2019 and a different population from the Medicare counts above, so the two cannot be compared directly.

Do Medicaid programs cover acupuncture?

Coverage varies by state, and no national count from a primary source was found. A 2025 review of Medicaid policies in five large states (California, Illinois, Texas, North Carolina and New York, 2018 to 2023) found that only 2 of the five covered acupuncture, while all five covered physical therapy (Adams et al., JAMA Network Open). Survey figures on how many adults have insurance coverage for acupuncture appear in the insurance section of this page.

How often do public companies' annual reports mention acupuncture?

Rarely. 11 Form 10-K annual reports filed with the SEC in 2025 contained the word "acupuncture", against a peak of 20 in 2011 and 2012 (our count). Over 2001-2025 the total was 310 filings, 71 of them in the first ten years (our count). We counted distinct 10-K filings per filing year with the SEC's EDGAR full-text search on 2026-11-04. The counts are filings, not companies, and a passing mention in a risk factor counts the same as a business description. Private companies, including the large acupuncture benefit managers and every acupuncture franchisor, file no 10-K. The yearly counts and filer names are in the CSV linked below.

The fall in insurer mentions says nothing about coverage on its own; we did not test why health plans stopped using the word. Insurer filers included Centene, Molina Healthcare, WellPoint Health Networks, Amerigroup and Health Net. U.S.-listed pharmacy, hospital and drug companies based in China account for most of the "traditional Chinese medicine" mentions. China Jo-Jo Drugstores filed 12 of the 310 acupuncture filings, more than any other company, and said in fiscal 2021 that 4 of its stores had adjacent clinics offering traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture and cupping (China Jo-Jo Drugstores 10-K, fiscal 2021).

What do public companies say about acupuncture networks and services?

The largest counts come from benefit networks, and none of them separate acupuncturists from other practitioners. Healthways said in its 2015 annual report that its physical medicine network had over 88,000 complementary, alternative and physical medicine practitioners serving health-plan and employer members who seek care such as chiropractic and acupuncture (Healthways 10-K, fiscal 2015). Renamed Tivity Health, it reported approximately 80,000 such practitioners in its WholeHealth Living network for 2018 (Tivity Health 10-K, fiscal 2018). In its last 10-K, for 2021, it counted approximately 29,000 physical and integrative medicine practitioner locations (Tivity Health 10-K, fiscal 2021). The unit changed from practitioners to locations, so the two counts are not a like-for-like decline. Tivity was taken private in 2022.

• Health Grades said in 2009 that its website carried ratings or profiles of over one million alternative specialty providers, such as acupuncturists, chiropractors and mental health professionals, in more than 40 specialties (Health Grades 10-K, fiscal 2009).
• OneSpaWorld, the cruise-ship spa operator, lists acupuncture and electro acupuncture in its health and pain management category, which it calls one of its largest and most profitable. It ran health and wellness centers on 199 ships and at 50 land-based resorts at the end of 2024, and does not break out acupuncture revenue (OneSpaWorld 10-K, fiscal 2024).
• Novo Integrated Sciences reported 14 corporate-owned clinics in Canada in fiscal 2024, with services that include acupuncture and functional dry needling (Novo Integrated Sciences 10-K, fiscal 2024).
• First Choice Healthcare Solutions, a Melbourne, Florida practice group, wrote that its physical therapists were trained in modalities including acupuncture, Dry Needling and cupping (First Choice Healthcare Solutions 10-K, fiscal 2024). Florida's rule for dry needling by physical therapists is covered on the physical therapy statistics page.

What does the Modern Acupuncture franchise disclosure document show?

Modern Acupuncture had 47 franchised locations at the end of 2020, down from 51 a year earlier, according to its franchise disclosure document issued May 10, 2021 (Modern Acupuncture FDD, Item 20). It had 35 at the end of 2018 and no company-owned outlets. The franchisor, ACU Development, Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona, began selling franchises in September 2016 and stated it had no parent company (FDD, Item 1). Its clinics use a membership model, with acupuncture performed by licensed acupuncture professionals (FDD, Item 1). These are franchisor figures; the FDD itself says no government agency has verified them.

In 2020, 11 franchised outlets ceased operations for other reasons and 2 were terminated, while 5 opened (FDD, Item 20, Table 3). The document gives no reason for the closures. It also listed 127 signed franchise agreements for outlets not yet open and projected 16 openings in 2021 (FDD, Item 20, Table 5). Minnesota's franchise registry shows the 2021 registration was followed by an Order of Cancellation in 2022, and no later Modern Acupuncture FDD is on file there (Minnesota CARDS). The 2021 FDD made no Item 19 financial performance representation (“We do not make any representations about a franchisee’s future financial performance”), so it publishes no franchisee sales or profit figures (FDD, Item 19).

What did a Modern Acupuncture franchise cost to open, and what did it require for marketing and video?

The 2021 FDD estimated a total initial investment of $258,337 to $663,772 per location, including $40,475 paid to the franchisor or an affiliate (FDD, cover page). The Item 7 table prints a high total of $666,772, so the document disagrees with itself by $3,000. These are the franchisor's estimates, not measured averages.

The video line is for the relaxation videos and music the franchisor distributes to run continuously in every clinic, not for marketing video. The FDD bars franchisees from running their own website or social media accounts without the franchisor's written consent. Few other franchisors on Minnesota's registry name acupuncture at all: a full-text search there returned 175 documents, almost all from fitness, IV-hydration, chiropractic and wellness brands that mention it in passing. One exception is Far & Dotter, a cannabis dispensary and wellness-center franchise whose optional spa may offer acupuncture; it estimated $1,400,750 to $1,741,750 to open a center with a spa in 2023 (Far & Dotter FDD, 2023).

How many licensed acupuncturists and acupuncture schools are there?

There were 34,524 active acupuncture licences in the United States on January 1, 2023, according to a count by Fan and colleagues of the American Traditional Chinese Medicine Association, compiled from state boards and online licence searches (Journal of Integrative Medicine). Removing people licensed in more than one state leaves about 33,364 individual acupuncturists (Journal of Integrative Medicine). Florida held 2,644 of the licences, third after California and New York (Journal of Integrative Medicine).

The same authors counted 37,886 active licences on January 1, 2018 (Complementary Therapies in Medicine), a number they said had grown 257% since 1998 (Complementary Therapies in Medicine). By 2023 the count had fallen 8.87% from 2018 (Journal of Integrative Medicine), and density dropped from 11.63 licensed acupuncturists per 100,000 residents (Complementary Therapies in Medicine) to 10.36 (Journal of Integrative Medicine). These are licence counts, not counts of people in active practice.

The number of schools also fell. The 56 accredited schools open in early 2023 offered 147 programs, of which 31 were entry-level doctorates (Journal of Integrative Medicine).

How do U.S. acupuncturists run their practices?

About 76% of acupuncturists worked in solo practice or in space shared with other acupuncturists in the two largest practitioner surveys, the 2013 Job Analysis by NCCAOM (the national certification board) and the California Acupuncture Board's 2015 Occupational Analysis, according to a peer-reviewed comparison of the two (Journal of Integrative Medicine). More than 70% worked fewer than 40 hours a week (Journal of Integrative Medicine). Median income in both surveys was between $40,000 and $50,000 a year (Journal of Integrative Medicine). More than 70% of NCCAOM's national sample had been in practice 15 years or less (Journal of Integrative Medicine), and fewer than 15% of respondents had practised more than 20 years (Journal of Integrative Medicine).

The solo share is falling in a trade publisher's surveys. MPA Media, which publishes the trade magazine Acupuncture Today and sells advertising into the field, found single-practitioner clinics fell from 75% of its 2018 respondents to 68% in 2022 (MPA Media), while the share in integrated practices with at least two other non-acupuncture professionals rose from 4% to 9% (MPA Media). Its 2022 survey reached a response rate of 1.65% of 33,199 acupuncturists emailed (MPA Media). Its January 2025 survey drew 487 responses from 33,713 acupuncturists emailed (MPA Media); 74% of those respondents had been in practice 15 years or more (MPA Media), so the sample leans to long-established practitioners.

Practice volume is small next to chiropractic. In a telephone survey of 70 licensed acupuncturists in metropolitan Tucson, Arizona, published in 2015, acupuncturists saw a mean of 22.29 patients a week, against 83.13 for chiropractors (BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine). 80% of the Tucson acupuncturists worked from one location (BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine), and 27.6% of their 87 practice locations had more than one practitioner or several disciplines (BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine). An older four-state baseline from the late 1990s, by Cherkin and colleagues, found 51%-74% of licensed acupuncturists, chiropractors, massage therapists and naturopathic physicians practised solo, against 26% of conventional physicians (Journal of the American Board of Family Practice), and visits to acupuncturists lasted about 60 minutes (Journal of the American Board of Family Practice).

Many add products and other services. In MPA Media's 2022 survey, 85% of acupuncturists offered cupping (MPA Media). In its 2025 survey, 70% offered e-stim/TENS (MPA Media), 30% offered cosmetic acupuncture (MPA Media), and 54% offered products to at least half their patients, up from 42% in 2022 (MPA Media). 74% used credit-card processing in the clinic (MPA Media).

Self-pay prices are posted openly. Across 723 clinics in 39 metro areas listing prices on the price site OkCopay.com around 2018, the median first visit was $112 (Journal of Integrative Medicine) and the median follow-up $80 (Journal of Integrative Medicine). From those prices the authors modelled average gross annual income of $95,760 per acupuncturist (Journal of Integrative Medicine), an estimate of gross practice income from prices and assumed volume, not a survey of take-home pay.

How do acupuncture patients find a practitioner, and what tools do practices use?

In the most recent U.S. study of referral sources we found, from the late 1990s in four states, at least two thirds of visits to licensed acupuncturists, chiropractors, massage therapists and naturopathic physicians were self-referrals, and only 4% to 12% came from a conventional physician's referral (Journal of the American Board of Family Practice). Less than one third of visits to acupuncturists were covered by insurance (Journal of the American Board of Family Practice). No more recent U.S. study we found measured referral sources for acupuncture patients.

Practices are light users of software and marketing services. In MPA Media's 2025 survey, 43% of acupuncturists used no electronic health record software and were not interested in it (MPA Media). Jane was the most-used brand at 10%, followed by Unified Practice at 5% (MPA Media); both sell practice software to acupuncturists, and the figures are the publisher's, not theirs. Among those in practice less than five years, 48% used Jane (MPA Media). Almost a third, 31%, used marketing or patient-education services (MPA Media); the survey does not say whether any of that was video. In MPA's 2022 survey, seminars were the most-used source of professional news at 76% (MPA Media). Neither Jane nor Unified Practice publishes acupuncture-specific usage figures that we could find.

Did acupuncturists move to telehealth?

In May 2020, 38% of licensed acupuncturists answering a national survey were providing telehealth, mostly advice rather than needling (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine). One thousand forty-five acupuncturists from 46 states answered that Acupuncture and Telehealth Survey (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine), though only 21% had received telehealth training (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine) and 13% were considering it (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine). Working hours fell by a mean of 18.7 hours a week (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine). Telehealth visits mainly taught nutrition, herbal therapies and acupressure. The sample was recruited through social media and webinars, so it is not random.

In a 2021 survey of 103 licensed acupuncturists who had treated patients with likely COVID-19 symptoms, phone and videoconference were the main ways of contacting patients (Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine). At the Department of Veterans Affairs, telephone or video encounters were 17.3% of encounters with acupuncturists, chiropractors and massage therapists at 18 sites in 2020 (Telemedicine and e-Health) and 5.4% in 2021 (Telemedicine and e-Health), a combined figure for the three professions.

How often do cancer centers and acupuncturists overlap?

In a survey of National Comprehensive Cancer Network member institutions published in January 2026, 69% of the 29 responding centers offered acupressure or acupuncture (Journal of the Advanced Practitioner in Oncology). From the practitioner side, 472 of 2,213 licensed acupuncturists in the San Francisco Bay Area answered a survey on cancer care published in 2017 (Integrative Cancer Therapies); 77% said they cared for patients with cancer (Integrative Cancer Therapies), and 91% said oncologists had never or hardly ever contacted them about a shared patient (Integrative Cancer Therapies). The American Society of Acupuncturists' 2021 research survey drew 718 responses (Medical Acupuncture), a sense of how many practitioners a national association survey reaches.

What do people find when they search YouTube for acupuncture?

In a 2024 study of the 54 most-viewed YouTube videos on acupuncture for chronic pain, raters classed 57.4% as useful (Journal of Pain Research) and 14.8% as misleading (Journal of Pain Research). 41.8% of the useful videos came from a healthcare institution and none of the misleading ones did (Journal of Pain Research); 87.5% of the misleading videos came from health media channels (Journal of Pain Research). Useful videos scored a mean 3.77 on the 5-point Global Quality Scale, against 2.50 for misleading ones (Journal of Pain Research).

Narrower topics fared worse in other studies. Of the top 50 English-language YouTube videos claiming acupuncture effects on COVID-19, uploaded by February 2022, 98% were rated misleading (Medicine) and only 8% reliable (Medicine). In a study published in February 2023, raters who assessed 23 of the first 100 results on acupuncture for breech presentation rated every one poorly for reliability (Cureus).

Has anyone measured whether video brings in acupuncture patients?

No study we found, as of November 2026, measured it. Searches of PubMed for trials of educational, consent or recruitment videos before acupuncture, and for studies linking practice video to new patients, returned nothing that measured bookings or patient numbers. The closest trial tested video as the treatment itself: Massachusetts General Hospital enrolled 60 adults with chronic low back pain between June 2021 and July 2024 to watch avatar videos guiding them to imagine acupuncture, or imagine light touch (eClinicalMedicine). Both groups reported less pain, and the difference between groups was 0.47 points on a 10-point scale, not statistically significant (eClinicalMedicine). No needles were used. On the business side, MPA Media's 31% figure for marketing and patient-education services is the only practice-level measure found, and it does not break out video.

What do the largest evidence reviews say about acupuncture for chronic pain?

The largest pooled analysis, the Acupuncture Trialists' Collaboration's 2018 update, combined raw data on 20,827 patients from 39 randomized trials and found acupuncture beat both sham and no-acupuncture controls for each chronic pain condition studied, with differences close to 0.5 standard deviations against no acupuncture and close to 0.2 against sham (The Journal of Pain, Vickers et al.). The effect fell by only about 15% a year after treatment. The authors conclude the effects "cannot be explained solely in terms of placebo effects", while noting that factors beyond needling at the correct points contribute.

The 2012 version of the same analysis (29 trials, 17,922 patients) put the gap at 0.23 standard deviations against sham for back and neck pain and 0.55 against no-acupuncture controls, and called the true-versus-sham differences "relatively modest" (Archives of Internal Medicine). NCCIH's fact page summarises the 2018 data for back or neck pain as 12 studies (8,003 participants) favouring acupuncture over no treatment and 10 studies favouring it over sham, with the larger difference against no treatment (NCCIH).

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's 2020 review of noninvasive nonpharmacological treatments, which included 233 randomized trials, lists acupuncture among the therapies that most consistently improved function or pain beyond the end of treatment for specific chronic pain conditions (AHRQ, Skelly et al.). For chronic low back pain it rated the short-term pain improvement as moderate strength of evidence; for chronic neck pain it found improved function but no pain improvement versus sham (low strength of evidence). It describes effect sizes as generally small.

What do Cochrane reviews say about acupuncture for back pain, headache and osteoarthritis?

The 2020 Cochrane review of chronic nonspecific low back pain (33 studies, 8,270 participants) found low-certainty evidence that acupuncture may relieve pain immediately after treatment versus sham, by 9.22 points on a 0-100 scale, short of the 15-point threshold for a clinically important change (Cochrane, Mu et al.). Against no treatment, it found moderate-certainty evidence of greater and clinically important relief, 20.32 points on the same scale. A 2025 overview of 31 Cochrane reviews covering 97,183 adults in 644 trials concluded that acupuncture probably improves function slightly versus sham for chronic low back pain (standardised mean difference 0.38, moderate certainty) (Cochrane overview, 2025).

The 2016 migraine review pooled 22 trials with 4,985 participants and found an effect over sham that its authors call small (Cochrane, Linde et al.). The 2010 osteoarthritis review (16 trials, 3,498 people) judged the sham-controlled benefits "probably due at least partially to placebo effects from incomplete blinding" (Cochrane, Manheimer et al.). NCCIH also summarises reviews with negative results: a 2021 review of 9 studies (692 participants) found no significant pain improvement from battlefield acupuncture, the ear-needle protocol used in the VA and military, and a 2019 review of 41 studies (3,440 participants) found acupuncture no more effective than sham for irritable bowel syndrome symptoms (NCCIH).

What do clinical guidelines say about acupuncture for low back pain?

The American College of Physicians' 2017 guideline lists acupuncture among the nondrug options recommended as first-line treatment for chronic low back pain, NCCIH notes, with the evidence judged moderate quality for chronic and low quality for acute low back pain (NCCIH). In the guideline itself, Recommendation 2 tells clinicians and patients with chronic low back pain to initially select nonpharmacologic treatment such as exercise, multidisciplinary rehabilitation, acupuncture or mindfulness-based stress reduction (moderate-quality evidence), graded a strong recommendation (Annals of Internal Medicine, Qaseem et al.).

How strong is the acupuncture evidence base overall?

Large but mostly low certainty. A 2022 evidence map from the VA Evidence Synthesis Program found 434 systematic reviews of acupuncture for adult health conditions published from 2013 to 2021; only 127 formally rated the certainty of their evidence, and 82 were mapped across 56 conditions (JAMA Network Open, Allen et al.). Across those reviews there were 4 high-certainty and 31 moderate-certainty conclusions; everything else was low or very low certainty. About 75% of the high- or moderate-certainty conclusions compared acupuncture with sham or no treatment, and conclusions that acupuncture beats other active therapies with at least moderate certainty were rare. The VA's own summary page counts more than 300 reviews since 2013, of which 104 graded certainty, and reports no evidence that acupuncture is less safe than usual care for the mapped conditions (VA ESP). Its 2014 predecessor had identified 183 systematic reviews from 2005 to March 2013 (VA ESP, Hempel et al.).

A separate 2022 evidence map in BMJ Open, led by researchers at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine and McMaster University, covered 120 reviews from 2015 to 2020 that pooled 1,402 randomized trials and 138,995 participants (BMJ Open, Lu et al.). It rated 99.2% of those reviews (119 of 120) as having "low" or "critically low" methodological quality, and 81.7% of their first authors were based in China (BMJ Open full text).

How safe is acupuncture, and how often do serious adverse events happen?

Serious adverse events are rare: a 2021 meta-analysis of prospective studies estimated 1.01 serious adverse events per 10,000 patients and 7.98 per one million treatments (BMJ Open, Bäumler et al.). Minor events are common: at least one adverse event occurred in 9.31% of patients undergoing a course of treatment, about half of them bleeding, pain or flare at the needle site. The authors describe acupuncture as "among the safer treatments in medicine" but note heterogeneity above 80% and inconsistent definitions of an adverse event.

The largest single survey, published in 2009, of 229,230 German patients treated by physicians, found 8.6% reported at least one adverse effect and 2.2% one that needed treatment (Forschende Komplementärmedizin, Witt et al.). Two of those patients had a pneumothorax (a collapsed lung), and the longest-lasting side effect was a nerve lesion that lasted 180 days (Witt et al.). Two 2001 UK surveys reached similar conclusions: 31,822 consultations with doctors and physiotherapists produced 14 significant minor events per 10,000 and none classed as serious (Acupuncture in Medicine, White et al.), and 34,407 treatments by traditional acupuncturists produced no serious events (95% confidence interval 0 to 1.1 per 10,000) and 1.3 significant minor events per 1,000 (Acupuncture in Medicine, MacPherson et al.).

In trials, the picture is similar. The 2020 Cochrane low back pain review found low-certainty evidence of a similar rate of adverse events with acupuncture and sham (risk ratio 0.68), the most common being pain at the insertion point, bruising and bleeding (Cochrane, Mu et al.). NCCIH notes that improperly delivered acupuncture and nonsterile needles have caused serious harms, including infections, punctured organs and injury to the central nervous system, and that the FDA regulates acupuncture needles as sterile, single-use medical devices (NCCIH).

What does Florida require for an acupuncture licence?

Florida licenses acupuncturists under chapter 457 of the Florida Statutes, and in the 2026 edition an applicant must be at least 21 years of age and pass the national written examination in English (Fla. Stat. 457.105). Applicants need 60 college credits before an authorised acupuncture course and, for anyone enrolling since July 31, 2001, a completed 4-year course of study in acupuncture and oriental medicine (Fla. Stat. 457.105(2)(b)). They qualify through a board-approved national certification process, licensure by endorsement or a state examination (Fla. Stat. 457.105(2)(c)).

The Board of Acupuncture's rules fill in the detail. The approved exam is NCCAOM's four-module examination: Foundations of Oriental Medicine, Acupuncture with Point Location, Biomedicine and the Chinese Herbology Module (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-3.004). Applicants who finished their education after July 31, 2001 need a curriculum comparable to an ACAOM master's programme with at least 2,700 hours of supervised instruction (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-4.001(1)). Every applicant also needs 60 hours of injection-therapy study (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-4.001(4)(a)), plus 15 hours on universal precautions and 20 hours on Florida's statutes and rules (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-4.001(4)(b)). The statute caps the application fee at $300; the fee charged is set by board rule (Fla. Stat. 457.105(2)(d)).

How are acupuncture students supervised in Florida?

Florida's rule splits clinical training into stages: students observe a supervisor for the first 200 hours, then work with the supervisor in the same room for the next 200 hours (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-4.0015). In the remaining supervised hours a student must diagnose and treat at least 30 different patients (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-4.0015(5)).

What does acupuncture include under Florida law?

Florida law defines acupuncture as primary health care that includes inserting needles, moxibustion and the use of electroacupuncture, Qi Gong, oriental massage, herbal therapy and dietary guidelines (Fla. Stat. 457.102). The board's definition rule adds detail. Auricular, hand, nose, face, foot and scalp acupuncture are included (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-3.001(2)(a)), and cupping, moxibustion, magnets, gua sha scraping and acupatches are listed among the ways to stimulate points (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-3.001(2)(b)). Since March 1, 2002 acupoint injection of sterile herbs, homeopathics and nutritional supplements has counted as an adjunctive therapy, but intravenous therapy has not (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-4.012). Since October 1, 1997 every needle used on a patient must be sterile and disposable and used only once (Fla. Stat. 457.1085).

The chapter does not expand or limit the scope of physicians, osteopathic physicians, chiropractors, podiatrists, dentists, veterinarians or physical therapists licensed under chapters 458, 459, 460, 461, 466, 474 or chapter 486 (Fla. Stat. 457.118).

Which titles can a Florida acupuncturist use?

Only a licence holder may use the words acupuncture or acupuncturist, or the letters L.Ac., R.Ac., A.P. or D.O.M., with a name or place of business in Florida (Fla. Stat. 457.116(1)(b)). Practising without a licence or misusing a title is a misdemeanor of the second degree (Fla. Stat. 457.116(2)). The board's advertising rule lists "Acupuncture Physician" and "Doctor of Oriental Medicine" among the titles a licensee may use without it counting as misleading (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-9.007(3)). The Board of Acupuncture itself has seven members: five licensed Florida acupuncturists and two laypersons, appointed by the Governor for 4-year terms (Fla. Stat. 457.103).

What do Florida's rules say about acupuncture advertising?

Florida law makes advertising that claims acupuncture is useful in curing any disease a ground for denying or disciplining a licence, as it does false, deceptive or misleading advertising (Fla. Stat. 457.109(1)(d)). The board's rule applies to any oral or written statement disseminated to the public to sell professional services, without naming a medium. It treats an advertisement as misleading if it creates false or unjustified expectations of beneficial assistance, makes only a partial disclosure of relevant facts, or fails to name the licensee (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-9.007(1)). A licensee who advertises through an agent or a referral service is responsible for that advertising's content (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-9.007(4)).

What continuing education and records does Florida require?

Florida acupuncturists must complete at least 30 continuing education hours in each two-year licence period, including 5 hours of biomedical sciences, 2 on preventing medical errors and 2 on Florida laws and rules, plus 3 hours on HIV/AIDS at first renewal (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-7.0015). That matches the statutory ceiling: the board may require up to 30 hours every two years (Fla. Stat. 457.107(3)). Since a June 2025 amendment, records must be written for each date of service and in English, and kept for five (5) years after the last entry (Fla. Admin. Code 64B1-10.001).

Can other Florida professions perform acupuncture or dry needling?

Florida chiropractic physicians may use acupuncture once certified by their board, and since a 2024 law they may also perform dry needling for trigger points or myofascial pain (Fla. Stat. 460.403). Acupuncture certification needs a course of at least 100 hours at an accredited institution (Fla. Admin. Code 64B2-11.012). Dry needling needs 40 hours of in-person continuing education (24 for chiropractors already certified in acupuncture) and a written and practical exam; online courses do not count (Fla. Stat. 460.4085(1)(a)). It also needs at least 10 supervised patient sessions (Fla. Stat. 460.4085(1)(b)). Florida's separate dry-needling rule for physical therapists is covered on the physical therapy statistics page.

Florida's telehealth statute lists practitioners licensed under chapter 457 among the telehealth providers who may treat patients remotely, held to the same standard of practice as in-person care (Fla. Stat. 456.47).

Does Medicare cover acupuncture?

Medicare Part B has covered acupuncture only for chronic low back pain, for services on or after January 21, 2020, under National Coverage Determination 30.3.3 (CMS NCD 30.3.3). CMS defines chronic low back pain as pain lasting 12 weeks or longer that has no identifiable systemic cause and is not linked to surgery or pregnancy (CMS NCD 30.3.3). Medicare covers up to 12 visits in 90 days (CMS NCD 30.3.3). Patients who improve get 8 more sessions, with no more than 20 treatments a year, and treatment must stop if the patient is not improving (CMS NCD 30.3.3). Claims for the extra visits carry the -KX modifier, which confirms they are medically necessary and documented (CMS MLN MM11755). After the Part B deductible the patient pays 20% of the Medicare-approved amount (Medicare.gov).

Who can bill Medicare for acupuncture?

Medicare.gov says Medicare "can't pay licensed acupuncturists directly" for their services (Medicare.gov). Physicians may furnish acupuncture under state law. Physician assistants, nurse practitioners, clinical nurse specialists and auxiliary personnel need a masters or doctoral level degree in acupuncture or Oriental medicine from an ACAOM-accredited school and a current, full, unrestricted state licence (CMS NCD 30.3.3). Auxiliary personnel, the route for licensed acupuncturists, must work under the supervision of a physician, PA or NP/CNS as set in 42 CFR 410.26 and 410.27 (CMS NCD 30.3.3).

Does Medicare pay for dry needling?

Since 2020 Medicare has paid for dry needling only as acupuncture for chronic low back pain under NCD 30.3.3. CMS tells its contractors to pay for that care when billed with CPT codes 97810, 97811, 97813, 97814, 20560 and 20561 (CMS MLN MM11755). Codes 20560 and 20561 are the needle-insertion-without-injection codes used for dry needling. For any other condition, all types of acupuncture, including dry needling, are non-covered (CMS NCD 30.3.3).

How did Medicare's acupuncture policy change?

From May 1980 until 2020, Medicare's acupuncture rule (NCD 30.3) barred payment for acupuncture as an anesthetic, as an analgesic or for other therapeutic purposes (CMS MLN MM11755). CMS opened its coverage analysis on January 15, 2019. It received 755 public comments in the first comment period (CMS decision memo) and 644 on the proposed decision posted in July 2019 (CMS decision memo). The final decision memo, CAG-00452N, is dated January 21, 2020 (CMS decision memo).

Does the VA provide acupuncture?

Yes, under VA's 2022 directive. VHA Directive 1137, dated December 13, 2022, lists eight complementary and integrative health approaches VA must make available to Veterans, and item one is "Acupuncture" (VHA Directive 1137). They must be offered at a VA medical facility in person or by telehealth, through community care providers or through Veterans Care Agreements (VHA Directive 1137). VA says a qualification standard published in February 2018 let VA medical centers hire licensed acupuncturists (VA Whole Health).

Do TRICARE and federal employee plans cover acupuncture?

TRICARE does not. Its covered-services page says "TRICARE doesn’t cover acupuncture" (TRICARE, Internet Archive copy, April 2026), and the program's regulation excludes "Acupuncture, whether used as a therapeutic agent or as an anesthetic" from the Basic Program (32 CFR 199.4(g)(40)). Federal Employees Health Benefits plans set their own terms. In one example, the 2026 Blue Cross and Blue Shield Service Benefit Plan's FEP Blue Standard option lists acupuncture with a 24 visit limit/calendar year (FEP Blue Standard 2026 summary of benefits).

How does the FDA regulate acupuncture needles?

FDA classifies the acupuncture needle, a solid stainless steel needle intended to pierce the skin, as a Class II (special controls) device (21 CFR 880.5580). The special controls require labelling for single use only and as a prescription device, plus biocompatibility and sterility (21 CFR 880.5580(b)). FDA moved acupuncture needles from class III to class II by an order dated March 29, 1996, announced in the Federal Register on December 6, 1996 (61 FR 64616).

How do acupuncture licensing rules differ by state?

Training floors differ widely across the four largest licensing states as of 2026. California requires an approved programme of at least 3,000 hours, at least 2,050 of them didactic and laboratory and 950 supervised clinical (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 4927.5). Florida's rule asks for 2,700 hours of supervised instruction. Texas sets a statutory floor of 1,800 instructional hours for acupuncture schools, which board rules may raise (Tex. Occ. Code 205.206). Each state's own statute or board rule is the source for its row below.

Ages come from Fla. Stat. 457.105, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 4938, N.Y. Educ. Law 8214 and Tex. Occ. Code 205.203. "Not compared here" means the figure was not collected for this page.

Which state acupuncture rules stand out?

New York requires every licensed acupuncturist to advise each patient of the importance of consulting with a licensed physician about the condition, and to keep a form signed by both in the patient's records (N.Y. Educ. Law 8211). New York licensees pay five hundred dollars for initial licensure and two hundred fifty dollars for each three-year registration (N.Y. Educ. Law 8214). New York also lets the department certify physicians and dentists as acupuncturists, provided they do not present themselves as licensed acupuncturists (N.Y. Educ. Law 8216).

Texas lets a licensed acupuncturist treat a person only if a physician or dentist evaluated the condition within six months before treatment, or a chiropractor referred the person within 30 days; the medical board may allow some treatment without referral by rule (Tex. Occ. Code 205.301).

California treats an acupuncturist's use of the title "Doctor" or "Dr." without an authorising licence or earned doctorate as unprofessional conduct (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code 4936). Florida, by contrast, lists "Acupuncture Physician" among permitted titles (Acupuncture Physician).

How do states regulate dry needling by physical therapists and chiropractors?

State dry-needling rules range from a fixed hour count to no number at all, as of 2026. Illinois requires the most of the states checked here: 200 supervised patient treatment sessions on top of 50 instructional hours, 30 dry-needling hours and 54 practicum hours, then a competency exam (225 ILCS 90/1.5(b)). Illinois also draws a line against acupuncture: dry needling there excludes auricular points, distal points, needle retention and retained electric stimulation (225 ILCS 90/1.5(a)). Virginia sets no hour count but says dry needling is "not an entry level skill" and requires post-graduate training with a face-to-face lab, a theoretical and practical exam, written informed consent and no delegation to assistants (18VAC112-20-121).

The table covers only states whose statute or rule text was read for this page. No state was confirmed from a primary page as not licensing acupuncturists, so none is listed that way.

What do the popular acupuncture numbers really say?

Four numbers that acupuncture pages repeat trace back to narrower sources than the repeats suggest. Acupuncture is said to be 3,000 or 5,000 years old, but the oldest dated texts and needles come from the 2nd century BCE. "10 million treatments a year" has no source we could find; the nearest federal figure is a 1993 FDA estimate of 9 to 12 million visits that federal pages had stopped printing by 2002. The "WHO list" of conditions comes from a 2003 review whose disclaimer the repeats drop. The video conversion figure comes from one video vendor's client tests. Each claim below gives the claim as repeated, where it came from and what to use instead. Earlier editions of federal and vendor pages were read in Internet Archive captures. Peer-reviewed abstracts were read through the National Library of Medicine's E-utilities.

"Acupuncture is 3,000 (or 5,000) years old"

The claim as repeated. Acupuncture of West Florida, a clinic in Clearwater, heads its acupuncture page with "5,000 years of clinical wisdom" (Acupuncture of West Florida). The Jakarta Post wrote in August 2010 that acupuncture "is believed to have been developed approximately 5,000 years ago" (Jakarta Post, 2010). News-Medical, a health news site, says sharpened stones and bones were used for acupuncture "around 6000 BCE", naming no find (News-Medical). The large U.S. health sources give smaller numbers or none. NCCIH, the federal research center, says acupuncture has been in use in some form for at least 2,500 years (NCCIH). Pacific College of Health and Science, an acupuncture school, says Chinese medicine has recorded instances dating back 2,000 years (Pacific College). Johns Hopkins Medicine says only that Traditional Chinese medicine evolved over thousands of years (Johns Hopkins, 2026 capture). Mayo Clinic's and Cleveland Clinic's acupuncture pages give no age.

Where it came from. The federal "2,500 years" goes back to the NIH Consensus Development Conference of November 1997. Its independent panel wrote that acupuncture "can be traced back for at least 2,500 years" and gave no source (NIH, 2000 capture). NCCAM, as NCCIH was then called, said in 2000 that acupuncture originated in China more than 2,000 years ago (NCCAM, 2000 capture). The dated evidence fits the smaller numbers.

• The Mawangdui medical manuscripts were entombed at Changsha in 168 BCE (Shaw et al., 2020). They describe the channels: only eleven are recorded, not the later twelve (Chen, 1997). A 2011 medical-history paper found no proof of needling in Han-period excavated texts. It notes that the Mawangdui texts, buried in B.C. 168, tie the channels to moxibustion. The first proof of acupuncture is in Sima Qian's Shiji (Jung, 2011). That paper puts the start of acupuncture around 190-176 BC, when the physician Chunyu Yi practised (Jung, 2011). News-Medical prints the tomb date as 198 BCE (News-Medical).
• The Huangdi Neijing, the classic usually cited as the first full account of needling, is about 2,000 years old. A 2017 paper from the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences says its present two-part edition was put together during the Eastern Han Dynasty, in a royal collating of 100-110 CE (Zhang et al., 2017). A 2024 review in Medical Acupuncture says the Neijing was written 2000+ years ago (Dorsher, 2024).
• Gold and silver acupuncture needles were found in the tomb of the Han prince Liu Sheng, who died in 113 BC, at Mancheng in Hebei (University of Washington). The needles measure 6-7cm (University of Washington).
• The 5,000-year form matches no Chinese document. The nearest number is the Iceman (Ötzi), found in the Alps in 1991. The museum that holds him says 61 tattoos were found on his body, made as charcoal-rubbed cuts rather than with a needle (South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology). It dates him to 5300 years ago and calls the idea that the tattoos soothed pain a theory (South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology). A 2013 examination of the 5,300 year old mummy says the tattoos may have been used in acupuncture-like treatment of pain (Kean et al., 2013). The research institute that studies the mummy said in 2019 that other studies had related the tattoos to an "early form of acupuncture". It concluded only that care and treatment were common in his time (Zink et al., 2019). The 1998 and 1999 papers that first proposed "5200-year-old acupuncture" (Dorfer et al., in Science and The Lancet) were not read: both journals exclude this research agent in robots.txt, and PubMed carries no abstract for either.

What to use instead. "About 2,000 years" is what the dated texts and needles support: 168 BCE for the Mawangdui channel texts and 113 BC for Liu Sheng's needles. The 2011 history above finds the earliest evidence of needling in the Shiji. NCCIH's "at least 2,500 years" is a 1997 panel's unsourced figure. Tattoos on a 5,300-year-old European body are evidence of marks at painful sites, not of Chinese acupuncture, and the researchers who study him do not claim more.

"X million Americans get acupuncture each year" (or "10 million treatments a year")

The claim as repeated. A 2014 editorial in Global Advances in Health and Medicine, by the chair of NCCAOM's acupuncture committee, said that "more than 10 million acupuncture treatments are administered annually in the United States alone" (Hao and Mittelman, 2014). Its source is a consumer-health page licensed from EBSCO and published on NYU Langone's site. That page said the same in 2011, the earliest form we found, and it cites nothing: more than 10 million treatments a year (NYU Langone / EBSCO, 2011 capture). Other pages print 3 million, 3.5 million or "millions" of Americans a year.

Where it came from. The oldest federal figures count visits, not people. NCCAM's fact sheet in 2000 said that in 1993 the FDA estimated Americans made 9 to 12 million visits a year to acupuncture practitioners (NCCAM, 2000 capture). It credits an FDA staff overview that could not be found online. The 1997 NIH panel wrote that "it has been reported" that more than 1 million Americans receive acupuncture each year, with no citation (NIH, 2000 capture). By October 2002 NCCAM had switched to a Harvard survey published in 1998, which estimated more than five million visits a year (NCCAM, 2002 capture). The National Health Interview Survey, run by the National Center for Health Statistics, first asked about acupuncture in 2002. NCCAM reported that 2.1 million U.S. adults had used it in the previous year (NCCAM, 2005 capture). It also reported that 8.2 million had ever used it, a lifetime figure that repeats sometimes present as yearly use (NCCAM, 2005 capture). For 2007 it reported 3.1 million adults (NCCAM, 2010 capture) and 150,000 children (NCCAM, 2010 capture). The "3.5 million" form is the 2012 survey's 3,484 thousand adults.

What to use instead. A people-count from a named survey year: the National Health Interview Survey's share of adults who used acupuncture in the past 12 months, which NCCIH puts at 2.2 percent in 2022 (see the use section of this page). Treatment or visit counts need their own source and year. The "10 million treatments" sentence has none, and the FDA's 1993 estimate is more than 30 years old.

"The WHO says acupuncture treats 28 (or 43, or 100-plus) conditions"

The claim as repeated. Acupuncture Today, a trade publication for acupuncturists, printed the WHO list in October 2004 and called it "absolute concerning acupuncture's effectiveness". It said the second category held 68 specific conditions (Acupuncture Today). It did not print WHO's disclaimer. In 2014 Austria's Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Health Technology Assessment, a publicly funded assessment body, counted WHO recommendations for acupuncture covering a total of 108 indications (LBI-HTA, 2019 capture).

Where it came from. There are two WHO lists. The first came from a WHO seminar in Beijing in June 1979. WHO's own later account says the participants "drew up a list of 43 suitable diseases", that the list was not based on formal clinical trials and that "its credibility has been questioned" (WHO, 2003). The second is WHO's 2003 Acupuncture: Review and Analysis of Reports on Controlled Clinical Trials, drafted by a Beijing physician from published trial reports, many in Chinese. It sorts conditions into four categories (WHO, 2003). By our count the printed lists hold 28 conditions in the first category ("proved through controlled trials"), 63 in the second, 9 in the third and 7 in the fourth. The "28 conditions" repeat is the first category, and "100-plus" adds all four. The same review says: "Only national health authorities can determine the diseases, symptoms and conditions for which acupuncture treatment can be recommended" (WHO, 2003).

What to use instead. Present the 2003 list as one WHO-published review of trial reports up to its publication, with its own disclaimer. Do not present it as a WHO endorsement. When the Austrian institute checked WHO's indications against 55 Cochrane reviews in 2014, it found effectiveness shown for only 2 indications: migraine prophylaxis and pelvic and back pain in pregnancy (LBI-HTA, 2019 capture). Current evidence reviews are in the evidence section of this page.

"Video lifts conversions 80%"

The claim as repeated. Nucleus Health, which sells patient-education video to health-care providers, listed in March 2018 that video on landing pages "can increase conversion by 80%", crediting Eyeview Digital (Nucleus Health). iMatrix, which sells websites and marketing to chiropractors, says that according to WordStream a video on a website can increase the conversion rate by 80% (iMatrix). We found no acupuncture practice or acupuncture marketing page that prints the figure.

Where it came from. The trail starts with EyeView, which made and tested videos for its clients. A blog post of December 4, 2008 said visitors to eToro's site who watched EyeView's video were 20% more likely to download the product. That compared viewers with non-viewers, who chose for themselves whether to watch (EyeView, 2009 capture). The first 80% figure we found is in a post of February 10, 2009: viewers of EyeView's videos for UMOO were 80% more likely to become depositing users, the same kind of comparison (EyeView). In November 2009 a TutorVista manager said the first test on one landing page "boosted conversion by over 80 percent" (EyeView). EyeView's case study gave that one A/B test, with the video autoplaying for first-time visitors, as an 86 percent increase (EyeView).

How it changed. EyeView's 2010 white paper said that "in some cases" the boost was over 80% (EyeView white paper). It reported the eToro split test, earlier told as 20%, as almost 32 percent (EyeView white paper). By August 2010 Unbounce, a landing-page software seller, wrote that "a study by eyeviewdigital.com shows that using video on landing pages can increase conversion by 80%" (Unbounce, 2010 capture). That dropped "in some cases" and the single-client scope. Nucleus Health kept EyeView's name but not its scope; iMatrix credits WordStream instead.

What to use instead. Unbounce's own August 2021 analysis looked at about 35,000 customer landing pages in each of three periods from late 2020 to early 2021 (Unbounce). It found that video had a minimal or negative effect on landing page conversion, whatever the page's goal (Unbounce). Its ten industries did not include acupuncture. A practice that wants a number for its own site needs its own test: the same page with and without the video, shown to visitors at random.

Every popular claim our research pages trace, 735 in all, is on one page: popular video statistics, fact-checked.

How we built this page

We started from the questions people search for about acupuncture video statistics and looked for the organization that actually produced each answer. Every figure on this page sits in an evidence ledger with its source, the exact table or paragraph it came from, the measurement period, the population measured, and the date we checked it. This edition holds 667 figures from 74 publishers.

On November 4, 2026, each sourced figure on this page was re-fetched with the fetch cache cleared and matched against the recorded wording: BLS occupation wage estimates and Employment Projections (through the BLS data API), the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages and the Current Population Survey; Census County Business Patterns, Nonemployer Statistics and the 2022 Economic Census (through the Census data API) and the 2022 NAICS Manual; CMS’s Medicare Physician and Other Practitioners files (through CMS’s data API), its National Coverage Determination, decision memo and billing article, and Medicare.gov; NCHS and NCCIH reports on the National Health Interview Survey (cdc.gov pages through Internet Archive copies, because cdc.gov refuses automated requests); AHRQ and VA Evidence Synthesis Program reviews; peer-reviewed studies (PubMed abstracts and PMC articles re-read through the National Library of Medicine’s E-utilities, because pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov refuse automated requests); Florida’s acupuncture and chiropractic statutes and board rules, the Florida Department of Health’s annual reports, VA’s directive, TRICARE’s and FDA’s rules, and California, New York, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee statutes and board rules; the California Department of Consumer Affairs’ annual report (a 27.7 MB file re-read with a longer download), and NYSED’s and the Texas Medical Board’s licence statistics; the 10-K filings of Healthways and Tivity Health, Health Grades, OneSpaWorld, Novo Integrated Sciences, China Jo-Jo Drugstores and First Choice Healthcare Solutions, and the franchise disclosure documents of Modern Acupuncture and Far & Dotter in Minnesota’s public CARDS database; WHO’s 2003 review, MPA Media’s practitioner surveys, and the pages behind each popular claim. Where a site refuses automated requests we read an Internet Archive copy. Our licence counts come from Florida’s public licence search and the Colorado, Washington, Connecticut and Delaware open licence files, our Medicare counts from CMS’s public files, our location-page figures from pages we read one at a time, our 10-K phrase counts from EDGAR full-text search, and our YouTube figures from the YouTube Data API. We left out NCCAOM’s job analysis reports, eligibility rules and certificant counts and the Council of Colleges’ figures (their sites’ robots rules), ACAHM’s standards and program directory (the directory host’s robots rules and pages that render only in a browser), IPEDS completions for acupuncture programs (College Navigator’s robots rules), Science’s and The Lancet’s Iceman papers and Washington’s and Colorado’s statute sites (robots rules), and Working Class Acupuncture’s clinic pages (a bot check).

We only cite the producer: government agencies, regulators, company filings and official posts, and the survey owner's own report. We do not cite statistics roundups, Statista-style aggregators, or salary sites without a public method. We did not bypass paywalls or sign-up forms; where a full report was gated, we used only the figures its publisher states publicly.

Figures marked "our calculation" are arithmetic on the cited numbers, and anyone can reproduce them:

This edition contains no Mark Studios customer data.

Limitations

• Our YouTube read follows YouTube’s ranking. The 464 videos are what YouTube’s search returned for ‘acupuncture’, ‘cupping therapy’ and ‘acupuncturist’ (the top 200 results of each, sorted by views, with no country filter) on November 4, 2026. It is not a census of acupuncture video, view counts are lifetime snapshots that include views from ads, and we sorted 260 channels by hand from their public text. One acupuncturist’s channel holds 34.2% of the acupuncturists’ views, so we give that share with and without it.
• Seven brands’ location pages. Few U.S. acupuncture practices run more than one clinic with a page for each; the seven brands we could read listed 37 live clinic pages between them, one brand supplied 13, and none listed a Florida clinic. Within a brand most features are set by its template, so the shares describe seven templates, not the many solo practices.
• Medicare counts cover Original Medicare only. CMS’s files count Part B fee-for-service claims, not Medicare Advantage plans. Licensed acupuncturists cannot bill Medicare directly, so services they give under a physician’s, nurse practitioner’s or physician assistant’s supervision appear under the supervising provider, and CMS’s provider-level file leaves out providers with 10 or fewer patients for a code.
• Job and industry counts miss part of the trade. BLS’s payroll survey leaves out the self-employed, who hold about half of acupuncturist jobs, publishes no acupuncturist rows for the Miami and Port St. Lucie metro areas, and is not built for year-to-year comparison. Practices file under NAICS 621399, a code they share with massage therapy and other practitioners’ offices, and acupuncturists who are physicians file as physicians’ offices.
• Licence counts count paperwork. Florida’s licence search matches some licences to two counties, so county figures overlap and should not be added up; licences include holders who practise part time or elsewhere, and each state counts differently, so state totals are not directly comparable.
• Use and evidence figures have their own limits. National Health Interview Survey figures are self-reported. Evidence reviews measured particular conditions against particular controls, and many rate their own certainty low or moderate; this page reports what each found and recommends no treatment.
• Practitioner surveys are small or come from sellers. Most practitioner surveys drew a few hundred self-selected respondents, and the largest recent one comes from a trade publisher that sells advertising to acupuncturists. The certification board’s own job analysis reports were closed to automated readers, so we cite them only through a peer-reviewed summary. No study we found measured whether video brings acupuncture patients.
• Franchise figures are old and self-reported. Modern Acupuncture’s latest disclosure document in Minnesota’s public database dates from 2021, and its outlet counts and costs are the franchisor’s own.

How to cite this page

For a single figure, cite the original publisher named next to it, and link here if the verification trail is useful to your readers. Each figure has its own anchor, so you can link straight to it, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/acupuncture-video-statistics#DRV-204. To cite the page as a whole:

Mark Studios. "Acupuncture Video Statistics." Last verified Nov 4, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/acupuncture-video-statistics

@misc{markstudios_acupuncture_video_statistics_2026,
  author = {{Mark Studios}},
  title = {{Acupuncture Video Statistics}},
  year = {2026},
  month = nov,
  url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/acupuncture-video-statistics},
  note = {Last verified 2026-11-04}
}

Our calculations and the evidence table are free to reuse with attribution and a link to this page. Each underlying figure remains the claim of its original publisher, and some publishers ask for a link when their figures are reused.

Sources

Download the evidence table (CSV)

1. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, NIH), Acupuncture: Effectiveness and Safety (2022-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
2. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, CDC), Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Among Adults: United States, 2002 (Advance Data No. 343) (2004-05-27). Accessed 2026-11-04.
3. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, CDC), Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Among Adults and Children: United States, 2007 (National Health Statistics Reports No. 12) (2008-12-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
4. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, CDC), Trends in the Use of Complementary Health Approaches Among Adults: United States, 2002-2012 (National Health Statistics Reports No. 79) (2015-02-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
5. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine (Zhang et al.), Acupuncture Use among American Adults: What Acupuncture Practitioners Can Learn from National Health Interview Survey 2007? (2012-02-22). Accessed 2026-11-04.
6. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, CDC), Trends in the Use of Complementary Health Approaches Among Children Aged 4-17 Years: United States, 2007-2012 (National Health Statistics Reports No. 78) (2015-02-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
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161. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (Federal Register, 61 FR 64616, via GovInfo), Medical Devices; Reclassification of Acupuncture Needles for the Practice of Acupuncture (FR Doc. 96-31047) (1996-12-06). Accessed 2026-11-04.
162. California Acupuncture Board (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code ch. 12), Laws and Regulations Relating to the Practice of Acupuncture (California Acupuncture Board, October 2026) (2026-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
163. Texas Legislature (Tex. Occ. Code ch. 205), Occupations Code Chapter 205. Acupuncture (Texas Legislature) (undated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
164. New York State Education Department, Office of the Professions (N.Y. Educ. Law art. 160), Education Law Article 160, Acupuncture (NYSED Office of the Professions) (undated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
165. Illinois General Assembly (225 ILCS 90/1.5), 225 ILCS 90/1.5 Dry needling (Illinois Physical Therapy Act) (undated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
166. Virginia Board of Physical Therapy (18VAC112-20-121, via Cornell LII), 18 Va. Admin. Code s. 112-20-121 - Practice of dry needling (2025-06-18). Accessed 2026-11-04.
167. Georgia State Board of Physical Therapy (Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. 490-9-.05, via Cornell LII), Ga. Comp. R. & Regs. R. 490-9-.05 - Dry Needling (undated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
168. Tennessee Board of Physical Therapy (Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. 1150-01-.02, via Cornell LII), Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. 1150-01-.02 - Scope of Practice and Supervision (undated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
169. Acupuncture of West Florida (acupuncture clinic; sells treatment), Acupuncture in Clearwater, FL (Not stated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
170. The Jakarta Post (newspaper), Acupuncture needles span the ages (2010-08-28). Accessed 2026-11-04.
171. News-Medical.net (AZoNetwork health news site), Acupuncture History (2023-06-20). Accessed 2026-11-04.
172. Pacific College of Health and Science (acupuncture and Chinese medicine school; sells training), About the Medicine (Not stated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
173. Johns Hopkins Medicine (academic health system that offers acupuncture), Acupuncture (Johns Hopkins Medicine Health) (Not stated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
174. National Institutes of Health (independent consensus panel), NIH Consensus Statements: 107. Acupuncture (1997-11-05). Accessed 2026-11-04.
175. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIH), Acupuncture Information (NCCAM fact sheet) (Not stated (captured 2000-08-16)). Accessed 2026-11-04.
176. The Anatomical Record (Shaw, Diogo and Winder; Bangor University and Howard University), Hiding in Plain Sight-ancient Chinese anatomy (2020-09-01). Accessed 2026-11-04.
177. Acupuncture & Electro-Therapeutics Research (Chen; New York Institute of Chinese Medicine), Silk scrolls: earliest literature of meridian doctrine in ancient China (1997). Accessed 2026-11-04.
178. Korean Journal of Medical History (Uisahak) (Jung; Korean article with English abstract), The study on the establishment of acupuncture (2011-12-31). Accessed 2026-11-04.
179. Chinese Journal of Medical History (Zhang, Gao and Li; China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences), Analysis of compiling date of Huang di nei jing (Huangdi's Internal Classic) (2017-05-28). Accessed 2026-11-04.
180. Medical Acupuncture (Dorsher; Mayo Clinic, emeritus), The Anatomical and Physiological Knowledge of the Huangdi Neijing Authors: Why It Matters (2024-12-17). Accessed 2026-11-04.
181. University of Washington (A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization, Patricia Buckley Ebrey), Han Tomb of Liu Sheng (Not stated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
182. South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology (holds the Iceman), Ötzi: The body (Not stated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
183. Inflammopharmacology (Kean, Tocchio, Kean and Rainsford; McMaster University), The musculoskeletal abnormalities of the Similaun Iceman ("ÖTZI"): clues to chronic pain and possible treatments (2012-10-25). Accessed 2026-11-04.
184. International Journal of Paleopathology (Zink, Samadelli, Gostner and Piombino-Mascali; Eurac Research, Bolzano), Possible evidence for care and treatment in the Tyrolean Iceman (2018-08-08). Accessed 2026-11-04.
185. Global Advances in Health and Medicine (Hao and Mittelman; Hao chaired NCCAOM's Acupuncture Committee), Acupuncture: past, present, and future (2014-07). Accessed 2026-11-04.
186. EBSCO Publishing (licensed consumer-health content, CAM Review Board) on NYU Langone Medical Center's site, Acupuncture (NYU Langone Medical Center, EBSCO CAM content) (Not stated (captured 2011-02-22)). Accessed 2026-11-04.
187. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIH), Acupuncture (NCCAM health information) (Not stated (captured 2002-10-10)). Accessed 2026-11-04.
188. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIH), Get the Facts: Acupuncture (NCCAM) (Not stated (captured 2005-09-30)). Accessed 2026-11-04.
189. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NIH), Acupuncture: An Introduction (NCCAM) (Not stated (captured 2010-12-04)). Accessed 2026-11-04.
190. Acupuncture Today (trade publication for acupuncturists; John Amaro, LAc, DC), What Conditions Does Acupuncture Treat (According to the World Health Organization)? (2004-09-30). Accessed 2026-11-04.
191. Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Health Technology Assessment (Austria), Acupuncture - areas of application, current evidence and proven indications (2014-11). Accessed 2026-11-04.
192. World Health Organization, Acupuncture: Review and Analysis of Reports on Controlled Clinical Trials (2003). Accessed 2026-11-04.
193. Nucleus Health (sells patient-education video to health-care providers), Current Trends: Healthcare Video Usage on the Web (2018-03-13). Accessed 2026-11-04.
194. iMatrix (sells websites and marketing to chiropractors), Chiropractic Marketing Tools (Not stated). Accessed 2026-11-04.
195. EyeView Digital (video production and testing vendor; sold the videos it tested), EyeView - The new "Conversion" game (2008-12-04). Accessed 2026-11-04.
196. EyeView Digital (video production and testing vendor; sold the videos it tested), UMOO - a prime beef example of EyeView's success (2009-02-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
197. EyeView Digital (video production and testing vendor; sold the videos it tested), Another video conversion success story (2009-11-10). Accessed 2026-11-04.
198. EyeView Digital (video production and testing vendor; sold the videos it tested), Case study: TutorVista (2009). Accessed 2026-11-04.
199. EyeView Digital (video production and testing vendor; sold the videos it tested), Making Video Accountable (EyeView white paper) (2010). Accessed 2026-11-04.
200. Unbounce (landing-page software seller), The benefits of using video on landing pages (2010-08). Accessed 2026-11-04.
201. Unbounce (landing-page software seller; analysis of its own customers' pages), Video on landing pages means more conversions, right? Wrong. Here's why (2021-08-26). Accessed 2026-11-04.

Update policy and change log

We re-verify every figure quarterly and when a major source publishes a new edition. The next scheduled review is February 2027. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.

• Nov 4, 2026: First published with 667 figures from 74 publishers, each checked against its original source.
• Nov 4, 2026: Reworded five takeaways and answers to match their sources: the self-employed job count in full, who can bill Medicare for acupuncture, the 2012 user count, the 2011 needling date as the paper’s conclusion, and what WHO says about the 1979 list.