Jobs / Healthcare / 29-1291.00
Acupuncturists
Diagnose, treat, and prevent disorders by stimulating specific acupuncture points within the body using acupuncture needles. May also use cups, nutritional supplements, therapeutic massage, acupressure, and other alternative health therapies.
- US jobs
- 7,830
- Median wage
- $76,040 a year
- Job family
- Healthcare
Can agents do the work of acupuncturists?
We read the evidence at the level of the job family, Healthcare:
- Task levelPartialOne benchmark, from early 2025. On Stanford's MedAgentBench, where agents do clinical tasks in a simulated electronic health record, the best recorded model completes 69.7% of tasks (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2). It has no maintained leaderboard, so newer models are not measured. No benchmark in our collection tests work with patients.
- Project levelPartialOnly adjacent evidence. GDPval includes nurses among its 44 occupations. OpenAI reports that GPT-5.5's deliverables won or tied against professionals' work in 84.9% of comparisons across all occupations. No benchmark in our collection tests clinical work over days, such as managing a patient's care.
Benchmarks for the job family
These cover work in healthcare, not always this occupation's tasks.
- 1846 EloClaude Opus 5.5 (Adaptive Reasoning, Max Effort, Default Fallback) · 23 Sep 2026Unrated
Typical tasks
From O*NET 31.0. Core tasks first. Few of these tasks have a benchmark today.
- Maintain and follow standard quality, safety, environmental, and infection control policies and procedures.
- Treat patients using tools, such as needles, cups, ear balls, seeds, pellets, or nutritional supplements.
- Adhere to local, state, and federal laws, regulations, and statutes.
- Identify correct anatomical and proportional point locations based on patients' anatomy and positions, contraindications, and precautions related to treatments, such as intradermal needles, moxibustion, electricity, guasha, or bleeding.
- Develop individual treatment plans and strategies.
- Insert needles to provide acupuncture treatment.
- Evaluate treatment outcomes and recommend new or altered treatments as necessary to further promote, restore, or maintain health.
- Collect medical histories and general health and lifestyle information from patients.
- Maintain detailed and complete records of health care plans and prognoses.
- Educate patients on topics, such as meditation, ergonomics, stretching, exercise, nutrition, the healing process, breathing, or relaxation techniques.
- Assess patients' general physical appearance to make diagnoses.
- Analyze physical findings and medical histories to make diagnoses according to Oriental medicine traditions.
Other job titles for this occupation (15)
Acupuncture Doctor · Acupuncture Physician · Acupuncture Provider · Acupuncturist · Chinese Medical Doctor (Chinese MD) · Chinese Medicine Doctor · Herbalist · Licensed Acupuncturist (LAC) · Oriental Medicine Provider · Traditional Chinese Medicine Doctor · Acupressure Therapist · Acupressurist · Auricular Acupuncturist · Auricular Detoxification Specialist · Auricular Therapist