After reviewing literatures both in China and in Western countries, we found that evidences to support acupuncture are a lot. For example, placebo effect requires the person being clear in mind to react to the placebo hint, and believe the hinted result, but acupuncture can work in some clinic conditions, in which patients are without, or with very weak, consciousness, such as coma, shock, persistent vegetable state, general anesthesia, delayed wake-up after surgical operation and so on. In addition, the healing effect of acupuncture is significantly different between different acupuncture techniques. Acupuncture can also work in infants and animals. Acupuncture and sham acupuncture have different influence to body physical and chemical conditions. All suggest that acupuncture has its own specific healing effect, independent on placebo effect. There fore it is too careless to tell that acupuncture is simply a placebo effect.

We also discussed possible reasons that lead to suspect that acupuncture is a placebo effect. The most important reason is the failure of acupuncture group, which is again mostly due to low treatment frequency and less total number of treatment sessions. The low healing effect of acupuncture group is therefore easily affected by the variations in the healing effect from sham acupuncture group, so to make the results of acupuncture studies in the Western countries inconsistent. We recommend that acupuncture should follow Chinese way of acupuncture, so as to increase the success in acupuncture study.