Posted for Heidi Ledford

The publishers of the British Medical Journal have announced their first business foray into the murky world of complementary medicine: the publication of a quarterly journal dedicated to acupuncture.

BMJ Group said yesterday that it has acquired the quarterly journal Acupuncture in Medicine, which was previously published by the British Medical Acupuncture Society.

The BMJ itself is no stranger to the technique. Judging from papers it has published over the years, acupuncture might be useful for treating all sorts of things: chronic headaches, chronic neck pain, back pain, and osteoarthritis of the knee (well, except when it doesn’t work). And who could forget the most curious and controversial acupuncture finding of them all: the meta-analysis which suggested that acupuncture improves the rate of pregnancy and live births following in vitro fertilization.

To be fair, the journal has also taken a critical look at the placebo effect, and even the safety of the technique.

But to those acupuncture skeptics out there, acquiring the journal was an embarrassing excursion into the land of woo. One blogger spared no mercy: “BMJ Group promotes acupuncture: pure greed”.

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