Sanjay Gupta Shares Insight into Acupuncture from UC Irvine’s Richard E. Harris, PhD

It Doesn’t Have to Hurt, a new book by Sanjay Gupta, includes insight into acupuncture, drawing on expertise from Richard E. Harris, PhD, and his decades of research into integrative medicine.

Well-known neurosurgeon and medical reporter Sanjay Gupta recently published a new book, It Doesn't Have to Hurt: Your Smart Guide to a Pain-Free Life. Offering the latest science-backed data and medical advice on a wide variety of pain relief techniques, the book covers everything from yoga and specialized psychotherapies to over-the-counter pills and patches. In Chapter 12, Gupta delves into acupuncture, introducing Richard E. Harris, PhD, a professor of anesthesiology and perioperative care in the UC Irvine School of Medicine and head of the Pain in the Brain Lab.

“Steeped in both Western science and traditional Chinese medicine, Harris is conversant in both, helpfully bilingual when it comes to talking about how acupuncture works,” writes Gupta. Harris, also a Samueli Endowed Chair in Integrative Health at the UC Irvine Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute, has more than 26 years of experience exploring acupuncture — the traditional Chinese healing practice of using needles to stimulate the nervous system.

So what insights did Harris share with Gupta, and how is the integration of Western science and traditional East Asian medicine helping advance not only acupuncture but healthcare more broadly?

Rediscovering Acupuncture for Pain Management

In It Doesn’t Have to Hurt, Gupta recounts talking with Harris about how far we’ve come in understanding pain and potential treatments. When treating fibromyalgia patients using acupuncture in the late 1990s, for example, Harris recalls being viewed as using a “fake treatment to treat a fictitious disease.” Fibromyalgia was not considered a “real” condition, and acupuncture was thought of as a good “placebo.” We now know better.

“As Western medicine has advanced its understanding, Harris is hopeful for increased adoption of these kinds of pain treatments for certain chronic pain conditions,” writes Gupta. Harris is working to expand our “toolbox” of options, pulling from ancient healing techniques.

“Acupuncture is one of those additional tools, and Harris underscores its relative appeal as a pain management option,” writes Gupta. It’s not addictive, doesn’t have side effects, can be added to almost any other treatment, offers long-lasting effects, helps the body’s own system correct itself, and is gentle. Gupta recalls Harris asking why anyone would use a sledgehammer for an illness if it’s not needed and writes, “sometimes those gentle tools are what’s needed, and certainly what should be tried first.”

Gupta also outlines how Harris and his colleagues aim to bridge the gap between medical cultures by compiling the Topological Atlas and Repository for Acupoint research, known as TARA. “The hope,” Harris says, “is that greater clarity on the biological basis of acupoints will increase integration into clinical care.”

An Interactive Map and Research Database of Acupoints

“One of the ‘bugaboos’ about traditional East Asian medicine is we don’t really know what the acupoints are, at least from a Western scientific perspective,” says Harris. “When we’ve gone to look for structural or functional outcomes in the places where the needles are put, a lot of times we don’t see any physical structure there. We don’t know what the acupoint is, and that’s been the gorilla in the room.” Given the importance of acupoints to the intervention, better understanding them is central to addressing critiques of the field.

Harris is working to provide clinical clarity through the TARA project. Funded by a five-year U24 grant from the National Institutes of Health, the goal is to develop a 3D topological map and database repository of acupoints.

“We’re building an online map based on MRIs of all the structures of the body — muscles, lymph nodes, blood vessels, tendons, ligaments, bone and importantly fascia — with markings for the 350 most common acupuncture points,” he says.

They’re also building a searchable database of all acupuncture-related published research. “This will bring together not only acupuncture research but also studies physically related to acupoints,” says Harris. “A physiologist who’s studying the median nerve could use TARA to better understand their findings.” He hopes it will become a valuable tool for both researchers and clinicians, within traditional East Asian medicine as well as conventional Western biomedicine.

A Fusion of Ancient Healing and Modern Medicine

A larger goal of this work is to offer more of a “whole-body” perspective when it comes to healthcare. “We’ve siloed every organ of the body with all these different specialists, but that organ isn’t living in isolation,” says Harris. “Techniques like acupuncture are part of a healing tradition that treats the whole body.”

Harris says patients who receive acupuncture for knee or back pain often report additional benefits. “Many times, people who get acupuncture say, ‘yes, my knee is feeling better, but I’m also sleeping better, have less anxiety and fatigue and more energy.’”

He adds that this whole-body approach is now becoming an emerging trend in Western medicine as well, with the move away from an overreliance on medication and surgery. “You now see a push for non-pharmacological treatments as options for chronic pain,” says Harris. “Opioids, for example, were previously used as a key medication for chronic pain when they probably shouldn’t have been used in the first place.” Opioids have side effects and can lead to addictions and even overdoses. “We need to better understand how to use them skillfully.”

Harris is currently collaborating with his colleague in the Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Care, Ariana Nelson, MD, on a clinical trial to see if acupuncture can augment the action of opioid drugs for pain.

“We’re looking to see if acupuncture can be combined with Western medicine in an effective way, possibly to reduce dependence on opioids,” he says, noting his research suggesting that acupuncture mobilizes endogenous opioid receptors. “If you pre-treat someone with acupuncture, we are asking if that can mobilize their opioid receptors in such a way that the patient doesn’t need as much of the drug because the receptors are binding stronger?” Then patients could receive the same pain relief with fewer opioids.

These are just a few of the integrative research projects Harris is conducting at UC Irvine. “The field of traditional East Asian medicine has ancient roots, and when you combine those roots with modern technology, new understandings can arise. It’s like you’re lifting the hood and seeing the car’s engine underneath and learning how it works,” he says. “We’re gaining new insights and, as we progress, it’s exciting to learn that we’re finding more conditions where acupuncture is effective.”

Interest continues to grow as well. Gupta highlights this in his book, saying his own curiosity was sparked by a trip to Japan. “I was so fascinated by acupuncture and the ways in which it might work that after returning from Japan, I decided to invite a practitioner to perform acupuncture on me on live TV,” he writes. “My goal was to demystify the practice for our television audience, and afterward, we received 1,000s of emails from people wanting to learn more.”

If you want to learn more about Harris and his research, visit the Pain in the Brain Lab. You can also learn more about acupuncture treatments offered through the UC Irvine Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute.