SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article
Front. Med.
Sec. Family Medicine and Primary Care
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1575226
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Increasing Relevance of Traditional Medicine Systems for the Primary Health Care Sector and General Practice: Global Research Perspectives – Volume IIView all 19 articles
Effects of acupuncture on musculoskeletal pain: An evidence map
Provisionally accepted
- Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM), Daejeon, Republic of Korea
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Background: Musculoskeletal pain is a leading cause of disability and reduced quality of life worldwide.Given the growing interest in complementary and alternative therapies, acupuncture has been widely explored as a potential treatment for alleviating musculoskeletal pain. This evidence map aimed to identify, describe, and summarize the current available evidence about acupuncture interventions on musculoskeletal pain. Methods: For this map, searches were conducted in PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Allied and Complementary Medicine Database (AMED), Web of Science, and Epistemonikos to identify systematic reviews (SRs) with meta-analysis published up to August 23, 2024. Included SRs were independently assessed for eligibility in pairs. The data from the eligible SRs were extracted and evaluated for methodological quality using AMSTAR 2. The findings were tabulated and mapped using bubble plots.Results: A total of 111 SRs fulfilled the eligibility criteria and were included in this evidence map. All of the SRs included manual acupuncture or electroacupuncture. Comparators included in SRs involved active comparators, inactive comparators, sham acupuncture, and no intervention. The included 111 SRs were categorized into 35 musculoskeletal pain conditions. The short-term effects of acupuncture showed a positive effect across most comparators in major musculoskeletal pain. All included SRs were rated low or critically low in terms of methodological quality.Conclusion: This evidence map demonstrated that acupuncture has favorable effects on major musculoskeletal disorders. Further improvements in the quality of evidence should be prioritized and more clinical trials on the acupuncture for treating musculoskeletal pain are needed.
Keywords: evidence map, Systematic review, Overview, Acupuncture, Musculoskeletal Pain
Received: 12 Feb 2025; Accepted: 23 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ang, Song, Choi, Jun, Lee, Yim, Lee and Lee. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Myeong Soo Lee, Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine (KIOM), Daejeon, Republic of Korea
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