The use of auricular acupuncture in opioid use disorder: A systematic literature review.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a chronic disease with significant personal, societal, and public health consequences. Even for the minority who receive the most effective evidence-based treatments, morbidity, and mortality remain significant. These facts, along with the recovery movement calling for individualized, holistic, culturally sensitive care, have led to the exploration of adjunctive interventions including acupuncture. Despite hundreds of international trials, however, there is a lack of consensus regarding its efficacy in OUD due in large part to methodological issues of trials to date. In response to these issues, the National Acupuncture Detoxification Association (NADA) developed an operationalized manual auricular acupuncture protocol that has since become the most widely used in the US. This systematic review is the first to focus explicitly on randomized trials utilizing the NADA protocol as a complementary intervention to address OUD.