In China, Traditional Chinese Medicine, as an auxiliary therapy to Western medicine, was extensively employed for the treatment of stable COPD. Acupuncture is a popular treatment for COPD in China. The most common treatment for pain in patients with COPD was acupuncture/transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation compared with physiotherapy in the Norwegian general population. Proponents argue that acupuncture is effective at relieving symptoms, reducing the incidence of COPD exacerbations and improving quality of life, and that it is associated with fewer adverse effects than conventional approaches to COPD.

According to clinical trial, acupuncture appears to be associated with improvement of dyspnea (labored breathing) on exertion, in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The management of dyspnea is an important target in the treatment of COPD, a common respiratory disease characterized by irreversible airflow limitation.
TCM doctors conducted a randomized controlled trial from July 2006 through March 2009. A total of 68 patients diagnosed with COPD participated, and 34 were assigned to a real acupuncture group for 12 weeks, plus daily medication. The other 34 were assigned to a placebo acupuncture group in which the needles were blunt (and appeared to, but did not enter the skin). The primary measure was the evaluation of a six-minute walk test on a Borg scale where 0 meant "breathing very well, barely breathless" and 10 signified "severely breathless."

After 12 weeks of treatment, the Borg scale score after the six-minute walk test improved from 5.5 to 1.9 in the real acupuncture group. No improvement was seen in the Borg scale score in the placebo acupuncture group before and after treatment (4.2 and 4.6, respectively), according to the study results.