I do acupuncture for my health

Her name is Dr. Becky. For 40 years now, she’s been practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine. She’s obsessed with improving my blood circulation, something I need all of the help I can get with.

Eastern medicine — including traditions such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda — generally takes a holistic view of the body, seeing it as an interconnected system of energy and balance.

Protecting this system means preventing illness, done with natural interventions like acupuncture, herbs, diet, and mind-body practice.

Sounds a bit like the goal of longevity medicine, right?

Western medicine is the scientific method at work. It says: identify the disease, find the cause, then treat it, whether it’s with drugs or surgery.

Some people turn to other therapies because they feel Western medicine doesn't always address the underlying problem, but if I get hit by an e-bike messenger in San Francisco, don't take me to an acupuncturist!

Longevity medicine seems to marry these two ideas— the precision of the West and the preventive orientation of the East.

And many Eastern traditional healing practices show clinical promise.

Sweet wormwood has been used in TCM for 1,600 years, and recently, scientists have identified anti-malaria compounds in it, which earned them a Nobel Prize. 

But other herbal formulas and treatments make claims when the evidence just isn't there—here’s what the research suggests.

These are the treatments that might have some medical upside, from turmeric (not the latte) to forest bathing.

A 2018 randomized trial in JAMA Internal Medicine followed 670 older adults at high risk of falling. A tailored tai chi program can cut falls by 58% compared with stretching — and beat a conventional multi-component exercise program as well.

Falls kill more than 40,000 older Americans a year. This might matter more than anything else on the list.

A head-to-head trial in JAMA Psychiatry compared eight weeks of mindfulness training with drugs such as escitalopram — the generic version of Lexapro — for anxiety disorders. The meditation group did as well as the drug group.

Fewer side effects. No prescription.

The American College of Physicians recommends yoga as a first-line treatment for chronic low back pain. Separate research shows regular practice lowers systolic blood pressure by roughly five points. For comparison, downward dogs could be as effective as the most-prescribed blood pressure meds.

There’s not a ton of evidence, but acupuncture is still one of the most-studied practices in the field. 

An analysis in the Journal of Pain pooled individual patient data from 39 randomized trials and nearly 21,000 people, and it showed that real acupuncture beats sham acupuncture for chronic back pain, neck pain, osteoarthritis, and headache.

The benefits were modest but proven. In other words, it was still more than most pain treatments can claim, with no looming side effects.

Studies show that spending a couple of hours among trees lowers cortisol and blood pressure and raises natural killer cell activity — your immune system’s frontline — with effects that linger for days. The studies are still small, but the intervention is free, and the risk is zero.

Take the walk.

The turmeric latte is showy BS, but the extract is medicine. A randomized trial in Annals of Internal Medicine found curcumin beat placebo for knee osteoarthritis pain over 12 weeks. An earlier trial found it worked about as well as ibuprofen, without the stomach damage.

The catch: you absorb almost none of it unless it is formulated with black pepper extract or fat.

The Ayurvedic root has a stack of small randomized trials showing it lowers cortisol — some by 20 to 30% versus placebo — and improves sleep and stress scores.

The trials are small, and supplement researchers ran many of them with poor quality control. What is on the label is often not what is in the bottle.

Foot massage feels indulgent, and there might be some benefits for long-term health. Twenty minutes with an experienced therapist could be enough to reap some benefits.

Small randomized trials in cancer, post-surgical, and dialysis patients show reduced anxiety, lower pain scores, and better sleep.

These are treatments you might use and walk out feeling better, but don’t try to cure anything too complicated.

Reflexology says specific zones on your soles map to your liver, kidneys, and heart. Systematic reviews have found no convincing evidence for any of it. 

Doctor Betty does tui na, the manual therapy arm of Chinese medicine—stretching, deep pressure, joint manipulation. She works the whole body, not just the sore part.

The trials specific to tui na are few, mostly published in China, and are rated as high risk of bias. But manual therapy in general — including its Western cousin, osteopathic manipulation — might have modest short-term evidence for back and neck pain, on par with a massage.

You have seen it in a park in Shanghai — people patting their arms and wrists to wake up circulation. The gentle version is harmless. The redness is capillaries responding to impact, probably more than evidence that “toxins” are leaving the body. No trials have shown those benefits.

Pat your arms if it feels good, but it is not a treatment.

Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps made the purple circles famous. The evidence never caught up. Most trials are low-quality, and the benefits are hard to distinguish from placebo.

If it feels good, fine. Just don’t always expect it to do what an Instagram post might say.

Like a pill, I “take” acupuncture. I do the tai chi and walk in the woods. I get the foot massage and prefer to ignore the chart on the wall.

And I still take statins for my heart and blood pressure meds.

Hedging your bets is not the same as believing everything. It means running the experiment on yourself with your eyes wide open — consider what has evidence, what feels good (and cannot hurt you), and be honest about which category each treatment is in.