How Nevada led the way in opening the door for acupuncture in the US

On a springtime day 48 years ago, people with canes and wheelchairs lined up outside a hotel across the street from the Nevada Legislature Building in Carson City waiting for the state Senate to pass a special emergency bill to legalize acupuncture.

Their efforts resulted in more than 17,000 signatures in support of the bill and treatment for dozens of legislators.

On April 20, 1973, the governor of Nevada signed the first state law in the US to license the practice of acupuncture.

The campaign for acupuncture in Nevada was greatly influenced by lawyer Arthur Steinburg, who brought Yee Kung Lok, president of the Hong Kong College of Acupuncture, to the state in 1972, when the treatment was illegal.

After the law was passed in Nevada, many other states followed suit, with California legalizing the treatment in 1975 and New York the following year.

However, many US doctors were conflicted by this form of traditional Chinese medicine, or TCM.

In the early 1980s, the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, suggested that acupuncture was a placebo therapy. To draw people’s attention to this form of TCM, Tian Xiaoming, who was a researcher at the NIH, established an acupuncture clinic to handle cases that US doctors considered troublesome.

Tian’s first patient was Mitchell B. Max, head of the NIH Pain and Neurosensory Mechanisms Branch, who could find nothing other than analgesics to treat the headache he was experiencing. He approached Tian, and much to Max’s surprise, he fully recovered after a dozen or so treatments, according to a report from the China Internet Information Center.

In five years, Tian treated about 200 doctors, according to the report. His patients also included many politicians from Washington.

The NIH changed its view of acupuncture, approving it as a treatment for patients in 1991. At the same time, the agency assigned Tian as a clinical adviser on TCM medical acupuncture.

In 1996, the US Food and Drug Administration classified acupuncture needles as medical devices for general use by trained professionals. The following year, the NIH held a conference on TCM and declared that acupuncture to be clinically effective and safe.

After the conference, the US government invested more than $10 million in clinical studies on acupuncture treatments for four major diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis.

In 2001, Tian was appointed to the White House Commission of Complementary Alternative Medicine Policy. The commission formally recognized acupuncture as alternative medicine in its final report.

In 2018, the Opioid Alternative Bill was passed in the US Congress, and President Donald Trump signed the Opioid Package H.R.6 Act, or Support for Patients and Communities Act, into law.

Both the Senate and the House of Representatives recognized acupuncture as one of the important integrative methods in pain management and in solving the opioid problem.

Since 2018, the Veterans Health Administration has covered the cost of acupuncture for US veterans and their family members.

Last year, the largest US federal government insurance program, Medicare, began covering acupuncture as a treatment for lower back pain.