The previously untold modern history of acupuncture and its enormous popularity in the United States, examining our ever-changing relationship with “alternative” medicine

Since acupuncture first burst into the Western popular consciousness in the 1970s, doctors and the public alike have clamored to try it and struggled with what to make of it. Thousands of studies and millions of dollars have been poured into determining how and why the practice works to stop or manage pain and other ailments—but it remains, officially, a mystery. That hasn’t stopped its growth; now a multimillion-dollar industry and often recommended by physicians and covered by insurance, acupuncture in the U.S. is more popular than ever. So why has it never been able to shake the label of “alternative” medicine, and what does that designation even mean?

To investigate acupuncture’s continued outsider status, Emily Baum traces the practice’s contentious trajectory over the past fifty years. Soon after the first Western journalists and doctors were invited to visit a newly reopening communist China, acupuncture became an overnight American sensation, as well as a thorn in the side of the pain-management industry, the object of parapsychological fascination, and a critical diplomatic tool for the new Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping. Even as the practice became commonplace over the following decades, it remained “alternative” as a result of lingering Cold War suspicions and a fundamental lack of consensus among medical experts.

Moving from the bold experimentations of the Cold War to the hospital rooms of today, Needled uncovers the surprising history of how acupuncture became marginalized within establishment medicine—exposing, in the process, the uncomfortable shortcomings of modern medical knowledge and how we behave when we encounter those limits.