How acupuncture relieves inflammation

Inflammation can both heal and harm. A core component of the immune system, it’s essential for recovering from an injury or infection – but too much can contribute to diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, cancer, and other serious illnesses.

“You need to fine-tune inflammation,” says professor of neurobiology Qiufu Ma, of Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He and a team of HMS neuroscientists, joined by collaborators in Houston and China, recently demonstrated one way to do that – with acupuncture.