Recently, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a set of five letters from eight scholars in five countries questioning a report on a randomized clinical trial of acupuncture for the treatment of joint pain published by the journal – Niu Xiwu, Department of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Bensteel General Hospital In November 2014, the newspaper reported that the World Acupuncture Federation held a special symposium due to a report about the “In November 2014, this newspaper reported that the World Acupuncture Federation held a special symposium due to a clinical trial report on the ineffectiveness of acupuncture in the treatment of chronic knee pain in the elderly, at which experts comprehensively challenged the report and called for the use of scientific methods to study acupuncture. In a recent development, on February 10, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a set of five “letters to the editor” from eight scholars in five countries questioning the report published in the journal. The incident began with a report published in JAMA on October 1, 2014, by Australian scholar Rana Hinman and 14 other authors. The report, entitled “Acupuncture for Chronic Knee Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” concluded that “for patients over the age of 50 with moderate or severe chronic knee pain, laser acupuncture (a new type of acupuncture that utilizes microscopic beams of laser light to irradiate acupoints) or acupuncture with needles had no benefit in terms of improving pain or function, and there was no benefit in terms of improving pain or function. no benefit in improving pain or function, the same effect as placebo, and the study does not support the use of acupuncture treatment in these patients.” JAMA is one of the most authoritative medical journals in the world, and is known as one of the world’s four most authoritative general medical journals, along with The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The British Medical Journal, so as soon as the article was published, it galvanized a wide range of attention in the media and the international TCM and acupuncture community, with many mainstream media outlets and websites, such as Reuters, distributing the news and comments. At the same time, many acupuncturists with many years of experience in the practice of medicine said that this is inconsistent with clinical experience, patients’ personal experience and the conclusions of a large number of basic experiments and clinical trials in recent decades. For this reason, the World Federation of Acupuncture and Moxibustion (WFAA) set up a special symposium at its congress in Houston, USA, in November 2014, which was attended by nearly 100 scholars, to question the quality and conclusions of this acupuncture clinical study, and at the same time to call on academics and the relevant governing bodies to improve the academic standard of acupuncture research, answer key clinical questions, not to draw too hasty conclusions, and to avoid the dissemination of unsubstantiated information. The authors of the five challenge letters are from different countries. The authors of the five letters were from the United States, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Switzerland and Germany. Each letter raised different issues, but all questioned the article’s conclusion that acupuncture is not effective in treating knee pain. Each of the five letters pointed out problems with the article in a number of areas, including trial design, acupuncture methods, measurement, patient observation, assessment, data comparison, conclusions, and academic integrity. The journal also published a response from the Australian authors, Hinman et al, which answered most of the questions raised in the letters in a positive manner. One of the authors of the five letters is Dr. Yongming Li, who practices medicine in New Jersey, USA. In an interview with the newspaper, he said, “It is very rare for JAMA to publish five letters questioning a report in the same issue, and it is usual for the journal to publish other similar questioning letters of less than three.” According to Li Yongming, the letters were representative, pointing out the shortcomings and hasty conclusions of this clinical study. After repeated reading of the original report of the Australian authors, Li Yongming raised a key issue in his letter that the original purpose of the clinical trial was to verify the efficacy of the laser, not to test the effectiveness of the acupuncture treatment, so it was unreasonable to conclude that the acupuncture treatment was ineffective based on this. The other two Chinese authors of the letter are Lai Lai Hang, dean of the School of Chinese Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, and He Hongjian, president of the Florida Acupuncture Association. They also raised a lot of questions about this report from different perspectives. Meanwhile, the experts involved in the questioning also said that interested readers can visit the official website of JAMA to check the original article and independently judge the rights and wrongs. (Reporter Zhou Manyi)