Introduction: Acupuncture

This bibliography was prepared in support of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Conference on Acupuncture held in Bethesda, MD on November 3-5, 1997. This document was prepared by staff at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM), primarily to facilitate deliberations of the consensus development panel assembled by the Office of Medical Applications of Research (OMAR) and the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM). The authors are mindful that this document may also serve as a primary bibliographic resource for American physicians and acupuncturists, as well as the English-speaking public around the world. With this in mind, searches were conducted with several accessible computerized databases using a multi-pronged search strategy that aspired to being comprehensive in an attempt to find clinical data relevant to the use of acupuncture points. In addition, the entire NLM collection of journals on the subject of acupuncture, not otherwise indexed and with English-language articles or summaries (Table I), was hand-searched by a medical epidemiologist for articles with relevant clinical data.

Acupuncture (vol. 1, 1990)
California Journal of Oriental Medicine (Spec Ed 1996)
Giornale Italiano di Riflessoterapia ed Agopuntura (Anno 1, 1989 - Anno 8, no.1, 1996)
International Journal of Veterinary Medicine (vol. 3, 1992 - vol. 6, 1995)
Needle (vol. 4, 1985 - vol. 6, 1987)
Pacific Journal of Oriental Medicine (no. 1, 1993 - no. 4, 1994 and no. 9 [c1996])
Revue Francais d'Acupuncture (vol. 6, 1980 - vol. 23, no. 90, 1997)
Washington Update of Acupuncture (vol 2, no. 1-7, 1997)
World Journal of Acupuncture (vol. 1, 1991 - vol. 2, 1992)

This bibliography has also incorporated much of the previous efforts and the organizational strategy of the Medical Acupuncture Research Foundation (MARF) bibliographies, compiled primarily by Russell J. Erickson, MD, and disseminated by the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture (AAMA)*. Most of the MARF topic sections have been further subdivided into sub-sections labeled "selected controlled trials" (Section A) and "other data" (Section B). Computer-indexed articles with descriptors including the terms "random" and/or "blind" (or variations thereof) were included in section A, along with hand-searched articles thought by the epidemiologist/searcher to be particularly useful controlled trials. While many excellent trials and useful case-series may have been included in section B, the clinician looking for the quickest and most definitive answers will usually be able to find many of the most important articles in section A. This bibliography includes citations indexed from January 1970 through September 1997. For ongoing acupuncture citations after these dates, the electronic databases listed in Table II will be very useful for the English-speaking clinician/researcher. Another resource that may be useful in the future is ACULARS, the Acupuncture Literature Analysis and Retrieval System, produced by the Beijing Institute of Information and Library of the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing. That database was not utilized for this bibliography because of its cost and the consideration that most of the information in ACULARS is not yet available in English.