Acupuncture
and interoception
An Integrative Insight
Acupuncture refers to the therapeutic practice of placing thin needles into specific sites on the body for a variety of benefits.
Interoception is defined as the sensation, awareness, or perception of the inner states of the body.
Long ago (at least a lifetime or two), in my first year research course in graduate school, we were taught to say “the mechanism of action is unknown” when referring to how or why acupuncture “works” in the body, at the same time as we were given a wildly fascinating insight into the canon of research on the matter. So much in this life is a great mystery, and yet, here we are, living it.
So how does any of it work?
The infinite attempt to answer this question is a lifelong exploration carried out every day in each individual session of my clinical and personal life practices. I sometimes explain to my patients that symptoms are like bumper strips on the freeway, essentially the nervous system’s way of telling us we’re not in our lane. These signals can be quiet and gentle, or they can be loud and disruptive, and much of the way we are trained to deal with them is to suppress and ignore. Acupuncture more or less works through a sophisticated and intricate system that is based in tapping into the body’s capacity for interoception to make our relationship with these signals more efficient and effective in adapting in our daily lives.
Research on Acupuncture and Interoception
In a study from 2023, researches observed that acupuncture appeared to induce “voluntary attention for interoception” through a comparison of true versus sham (a “phantom” acupuncture with no needle insertion) while scanning the brains of the participants. They found that real acupuncture (with actual needle stimulation) produced distinct patterns of brain network activity linked to internal attention and sensory integration – patterns not seen with the sham procedure. The authors concluded that a hallmark of acupuncture’s effect is how it draws the mind’s attention inward, tuning the brain into the body’s internal landscape . This aligns with what we observe in sessions: patients often enter a calm, meditative state, become more aware of subtle sensations, and report feeling “re-balanced” or “re-centered” afterward. Scientifically, this may be because acupuncture is engaging the interoceptive attention networks of the brain, essentially exercising our capacity to feel and respond to internal signals.
From the article:
“These specific cognitive-somatosensory interaction in REAL were differed from vicarious sensation mechanism in PHNT; and might be associated with a characteristic of acupuncture, which induces voluntary attention for interoception. Our findings on brain interactions in acupuncture treatment elucidated the underlying brain mechanisms for compound stimulus of somatosensory afferent and therapeutic contextual manipulation, which might be a specific response to acupuncture.”
Want to learn more? Check out these studies. More writing and analysis to come!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11440030/