A research agenda for the acupuncture community

In this manuscript, I describe a research agenda appropriate to the acupuncture community that is designed to fundamental questions of interest to patients and practitioners. The agenda would help schools focus their training to prepare practitioners to meet the needs of the patients who come to them, would prepare practitioners to be confident of the ways in which they can help patients and when they cannot, and would prepare patients to be more savvy and appropriate consumers of acupuncture. I describe 13 top research priorities. For each research priority, I describe why it is important to our general understanding of acupuncture, what type of data or experiments are needed to answer these questions and what groups of acupuncturists can best answer these questions.