Yes, acupuncture does work for insomnia. 

More Info: The benefits and effects of acupuncture surpass improved general health and a better sense of well being. The positive link between acupuncture in curing insomnia is now backed up by concrete scientific studies. Hence, acupuncture is now accepted by the Western medical community as a treatment for specific health disorders, one of them being insomnia.

Acupuncture as a Natural Treatment

Acupuncture as a treatment for insomnia may be just as effective as pharmacological treatments. Doctors when consulted for insomnia by patients often prescribe sedatives, oral hypnotics, tricyclic antidepressants and benzodiazepines. These drugs however have undesirable side effects such as dry mouth, cardiac conduction and urinary retention, among others. Furthermore, they can be subject to abuse. 

Acupuncture Treatments in Relation to Insomnia

According to a study conducted by Dr. Warren Spence et al, the specific benefits that are attributed to acupuncture treatment for the treatment of insomnia include: the significant nocturnal increase in endogenous melatonin secretion, improvements in polysomnographic measures of sleep onset latency, improvements in arousal index, increase in total sleep time and sleep efficiency in their subjects. Furthermore, it was also found that significant reductions in state and trait anxiety scores of their subjects in the study's clinical trials. The findings of this study agree with other studies that report the general relaxing effects that acupuncture treatments provide.

Special Cases

The benefits of acupuncture also benefitted patients who suffered insomnia as a result of being afflicted with Human Immunodeficiency Virus or HIV. HIV sufferers often experience disruption in their sleeping patterns as a result of their disease. Undergoing acupuncture treatments helped alleviate this specific symptom.

Inconsistent Findings

Although there are no contrary findings that explicitly disprove the effectiveness of acupuncture as an insomnia treatment, a study entitled "Acupuncture for Insomnia" conducted by Dr. Daniel KL Cheuk, et al. cautions in reporting that the existing studies available on this subject do not clearly support the use of such treatments.

The study of Dr. Daniel KL Cheuk et al. examined the reports and clinical trials of the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, the Allied and Complementary Medicine Database, and the Traditional Chinese Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System on the subject of acupuncture as an insomnia treatment. On the whole, Dr. Cheuk's study found that the existing reports had inconsistent findings on acupuncture's efficacy.