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About the Foundation

The Foundation is a small yet dynamic organisation committed to promoting high quality research into our understanding of acupuncture as well as evaluating acupuncture’s clinical effectiveness, cost effectiveness and safety. Established by the Northern College of Acupuncture in 1991, the Foundation provides an organisational base for carrying out and promoting research into traditional acupuncture:  

“The goal of the Foundation for Research into Traditional Chinese Medicine is to promote and conduct high quality research to develop the evidence base on traditional Chinese medicine, with a special focus on acupuncture”. 

The Foundation is involved in a number of research activities and projects. The largest project to date has been a pragmatic randomised controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of acupuncture in the treatment of low back pain.  The evidence on the safety of acupuncture has also been an important area of research for the Foundation, and surveys of practitioners’ and patients’ reports of adverse events have been published in leading medical journals. 

With the appointment of the current Research Director, Dr Hugh MacPherson, to a joint post at the Department of Health Sciences, University of York, we now have an expanded range of new projects exploring acupuncture’s potential for several conditions, as well as a neuroscience project exploring the brain images generated by acupuncture needling.