It's not ethnocentricity, Epic. I'm pretty sure you've seen me criticize homeopathy and the antivax movement as well. I criticize all methods that refuse to subject their works to double-blinded, scientific studies, fail when they do, and then claim that they are immune to scientific studies because of energy fields or some other nonsense. These procedures are cheap, sure. Dirt is also cheap. That doesn't mean you'll ingest it to treat cancer.
The fact that these procedures have been practiced for a long time is not a defense for them. The advantage of the scientific method is that it changes when new evidence comes in. There are no holy cows. If something doesn't work, it doesn't work, and that's that. With acupuncture, it hasn't changed at all. It isn't open to change. You never hear an acupuncturist say "Hey, when I was treating this boy with cancer with acupuncture he died. Do you think maybe the second chi field on the right is overrun and that we may have to rewrite the textbooks?" Nope. That's not how it works. It works because it works, and fuck you and your stupid "evidence" that says otherwise.
BTW, science, after all these years, HAS figured out the function behind acupuncture. It's the placebo effect. It's well documented that fancy sugar pills give a stronger placebo effect than plain pills. So, acupuncture is just a very, very fancy placebo. Since it's a placebo, we can't use it for medical treatment. We can't tell people "Hey, look, this doesn't actually do anything real, but if you use it and you think it does the placebo effect will kick in and it'll ehlp." And we can't lie to them, because that would be unethical. And the applications of placeboes are limited - they can't at all be used to fight cancer. They have use in pain relief, because the brain has power over that region. And that's about it.
