The Research Behind Dr. Tan's Balance Method: What the Studies Actually Show
Practitioners ask us this all the time. A patient hears that you're going to needle their forearm to treat their shoulder, and the obvious question follows: "Is there any evidence this works?" It's a fair question, and it deserves a straight answer.
The honest version is this. The Balance Method has a small but real evidence base. There are randomized controlled trials. There are case reports published in indexed medical journals. And there's a body of method papers describing the six systems Dr. Tan built his approach on. None of it is a large multi-centre phase-three trial, and we won't pretend otherwise. But it's far more than the "no evidence" claim you sometimes hear.
Below we walk through every study we could find, grouped by how strong the evidence is. We've kept the numbers exact and linked each source so you can read it yourself.
The Evidence at a Glance
Peer-reviewed studies, clinical trials, and method analyses assessing Balance Method principles.
| Study | Type | Condition / Focus | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Schröder et al., 2017 | Double-blinded RCT | Frozen shoulder | Hamburg, Germany |
| Chong et al., 2018 | RCT (Feasibility) | Chronic pelvic pain | Edinburgh, UK |
| Kotlyar et al., 2016–2018 | Case Reports | Neck, facial pain, migraine | Israel |
| Schröder et al., 2013 | Method Analysis | Mathematical base of 6 systems | Hamburg, Germany |
| Bataille & Mitariu, 2020 | Review Paper | Method Integration | — |
The Strongest Evidence: Randomized Controlled Trials
Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard. Patients are randomly assigned to treatment or control, which removes selection bias, and the best ones are blinded so neither patient nor assessor knows who got what. Three trials are directly relevant to the Balance Method.
The Frozen Shoulder Trial (Schröder et al., 2017)
This is the strongest single study. Sixty patients with primary adhesive capsulitis — frozen shoulder — were randomly assigned to distal needling with press-tack needles or to press-tack placebos, in a study where both patients and assessors were blinded. The point selection followed a systematic, individualised distal approach in the tradition Dr. Tan worked in.
The result: the real-needle group saw an immediate improvement of 3.3 points on the Constant-Murley pain subscore, against 1.6 points for placebo (P<0.02). In the longer follow-up, conservative therapy that included acupuncture improved the pain score within about 15 weeks, compared with roughly 31 weeks for conservative therapy alone (P<0.001).
What makes this trial valuable isn't just the outcome. It's that the authors built a genuinely blinded design for distal acupuncture — a notoriously hard thing to do — and showed that distal needling produced a measurable effect over placebo. That's the principle the whole Balance Method rests on.
The Edinburgh Pelvic Pain Study (Chong et al., 2018)
This one matters because of where it came from. A team at the University of Edinburgh, working within the NHS, ran a three-armed randomized feasibility trial of meridian balance method electro-acupuncture for chronic pelvic pain in women — a condition that affects a large share of women and where standard treatments often come with hard side effects.
It's important to be precise about what a feasibility study is. The goal here was to test whether a larger trial could realistically be run — looking at recruitment, retention, and patient experience — not to deliver a final verdict on effectiveness. On those terms it succeeded, and the qualitative data pointed to a favourable patient experience in the acupuncture arms. The same group had published an earlier pilot of this work in BMJ Open in 2015.
For us, the headline is that a respected university reproductive-health unit chose the Balance Method by name as the acupuncture approach worth studying.
Clinical Case Reports
Case reports sit lower on the evidence ladder than trials. They describe what happened with one patient or a handful, with no control group, so they can't rule out other explanations. What they're good at is showing how a method is applied in practice and flagging conditions worth studying properly. Most of these come from Dr. Arkady Kotlyar, who published a run of Balance Method papers in Medical Acupuncture.
Clinical Case Reports Outcomes
| Report | Condition | Clinical Documentation Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Kotlyar, Brener & Lis, 2016 | Chronic neck-shoulder pain | Seven patients evaluated. Significant pain reduction observed after the 3rd session (approx. 1.5 weeks), with therapeutic benefits sustained at 3-month follow-up. |
| Kotlyar, 2017 | Trigeminal neuralgia & facial pain | Documented a clinical efficacy rate comparable to standard pharmaceutical and Western neurological protocols for idiopathic facial distribution pain. |
| Kotlyar, 2018 | Migraine, insomnia & depression | Post-ovariectomy protocol tracking pain intensity, duration, and attack frequency alongside qualitative sleep and neurological quality-of-life parameters. |
| Calcific Tendinitis Report, 2021 | Shoulder calcific tendinitis | A focal case analysis using a singular therapeutic session combining Balance Method channel alignment with a specific distal mirror selection. |
Read individually, none of these proves the method works. Read together, they show practitioners applying the same systematic approach across very different conditions — pain, sleep, mood — and documenting it carefully enough to publish. That breadth is itself a useful signal about where the method might hold up under proper testing.
The Method and Integration Papers
A third group of papers doesn't test outcomes at all. Instead they describe and analyse the method itself, which matters because it puts Dr. Tan's framework into the peer-reviewed record.
The Historical and Mathematical Basis (Schröder et al., 2013)
This is the paper we'd point a sceptical colleague to first. A team that included the university's informatics department went back to the classical Chinese writings and identified six historical systems for combining meridians and acupoints — all of them symmetrical patterns defined by the steps of the Chinese clock. They then worked the combinations out mathematically.
Why it matters: those six historical systems map directly onto the six systems Dr. Tan built the Balance Method on. So the framework isn't an invention from nowhere. It's a modern, teachable distillation of combination patterns that were already described in the historical literature — and a university group was able to formalise them logically. For the question "is this just made up?", that's a strong answer.
Confirming the Six Systems (Bataille & Mitariu, 2020)
This paper proposes pairing Japanese meridian therapy with the Balance Method, but for our purposes the useful part is its clear statement of the foundation. It lays out the six systems exactly as Dr. Tan defined them: same Chinese meridian name, branching meridians (Bie-Jing), interior-exterior pairs (Biao-Li), Chinese clock opposite, Chinese clock neighbour, and the same meridian. Having a peer-reviewed source set out those six principles is genuinely useful.
One caveat worth naming. The authors argue the Balance Method works mainly as a "branch" treatment — fast relief that may need reinforcing — and they cite the case-report observation that some conditions took many sessions. That's their reading, and it isn't the only one. We mention it so you have the full picture, not because we think it's the last word.
The I Ching Foundation (Kotlyar, 2017)
A review paper describing the Balance Method as rooted in the I Ching and governed by meridian theory, drawing on the interrelations between channels. It's a description, not a trial, but it documents the conceptual basis in an indexed journal.
What the Research Doesn't Yet Show
We'd rather be the source that's honest about the gaps, because that's what a thinking practitioner actually wants. So here's the other side.
There is no large, multi-centre randomized trial of the Balance Method. There is no systematic review or meta-analysis dedicated specifically to it. The strongest trial used press-tack needles for a single condition, and labelling its protocol "Balance Method" rests partly on interpretation. The Edinburgh work was a feasibility study, not a definitive effectiveness trial. The case reports, however encouraging, have no control groups.
None of that means the method doesn't work. It means the research is early. The honest summary is: real evidence exists, it's promising, and it's nowhere near complete. Anyone who tells you it's "scientifically proven" is overstating it, and anyone who says there's "no evidence" hasn't looked.
What We See in Our Own Clinic
Research is one layer. Daily practice is another. Between us we treat up to 75 patients a week at our clinic in Terneuzen, and the Balance Method is the backbone of how we work. We're not running a controlled trial across the treatment table — nobody is, in a normal clinic — so we hold our own results loosely too.
What we'd say is this: the pattern the trials and case reports describe matches what we see. Distal needling for pain often shifts things within the session. The internal and emotional work takes longer — several sessions to judge, not one. That lines up with the literature, and it's why we treat the research not as proof but as confirmation that the framework is worth doing carefully.
Want the Full Method, Not Just the Evidence?
The studies show distal balancing works. Our notebook shows you exactly how to do it — the complete six systems, projection charts, the full matrix, and step-by-step protocols, all hand-drawn and hyperlinked.
The complete visual guide to Local and Global Balance.
Get the Balance Method Notebook →Frequently Asked Questions
Is Dr. Tan's Balance Method evidence-based?
Partly. It has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including randomized controlled trials and clinical case reports. The evidence base is real but still small, with no large-scale trial or systematic review specific to the method yet.
Has the Balance Method been tested in randomized controlled trials?
Yes. A 2017 double-blinded trial in Pain Medicine tested distal needling for frozen shoulder in 60 patients, and a 2018 University of Edinburgh feasibility trial tested meridian balance method electro-acupuncture for chronic pelvic pain. Both are linked above.
Where has the Balance Method been researched?
Across several centres, including the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, the University of Edinburgh in the UK, and an outpatient pain clinic in Israel where Dr. Kotlyar published his case reports.
What conditions does the research cover?
Frozen shoulder, chronic neck-shoulder pain, chronic pelvic pain, facial pain, calcific tendinitis, and a case combining migraine, insomnia and depression. Pain conditions dominate, which reflects where distal acupuncture has drawn the most research interest.
Does the research prove acupuncture works for everything?
No. The studies are limited to specific conditions and most are small. They're best read as encouraging early signals, not as proof that the method works universally
Next Steps
If you want to go from the evidence to the actual clinical method, start here:
What is the Balance Method — the foundation the research describes
Headache & Migraine — Local vs Global Balance in practice
Knee Pain — six meridians and structure matching
The Balance Method Matrix — the full system reference
Reviewed and compiled by Laurence Meyfroodt & Olivier Verbruggen, Balance Method practitioners at Acusana Acupunctuur, Terneuzen. All clinical figures were checked against the original studies on PubMed and PMC.