fwiw  in my view this is messier than most people will actually acknowledge and deal with  One reason I appreciate Middle s perspective on Acu is that he actually deals with that   There are a set of difficult hard facts here that there is no room in the acu article for due to POVpushing on both sides namely  acu is indeed based on prescientific principles   If anybody claims today that qi and merdians have any reality they are doing pseudoscience  conventional medicine fails to help people sometimes especially with regard to pain which we still do not understand very well on basic scientific levels and even today we lack drugs and devices that  effectively help some people who are in pain  clinical studies have shown benefit of acu in some populations of people who are still in pain when doctors have done their best with conventional medicine   the placebo issues dont matter clinically  the risk is tiny and compared to actually doing nothing extra some people who are otherwise in pain are helped by this extra procedure  that is what matters   the use of acu as a complementary medicine in the situations mentioned above is discussed in medical textbooks it doesnt get more mainstream than that and is widely practiced   some of that is driven by market demand but medical centers wouldnt offer it if there wasnt some rationale the clinical evidence for it I believe that Middle  gets all that which is rare around here  A reasonable article about acu would be anchored on those facts and I think if Middle  had the article to himself it would look that way  But you get acuproponents constantly making insane claims about acu and the quackfighters pushing back way too hard  The article is a wasteland and there is no way to make the extremes step away   So I stepped away  Thats my view again fwiw  and none of this excuses Middle s poor judgement in bringing the AE