This review also has further limitations, partially due to poor methodological quality and insufficient reporting of procedures in the clinical trials that we included. Moreover, we could not make the subgroup analyses detecting the effects of age, disease duration, target auricles, or treatment course because of insufficient data, and a funnel plot for the majority of the included studies was unable to be used to detect potential publication bias due to insufficient number of trials in every comparison and outcome. However, evidence of immediate and long-term effectiveness from auricular therapy could not be found, which was limited mainly to absence of immediate observation and follow-up performance.