What About Common Sense Reasoning?
If you had a severe case of tennis elbow, and you went to see an oriental medicine practitioner and he stuck needles in you and you didn’t get better, would you ever go back to see him again? Probably not.
1.3 billion Chinese are hard to argue with. The system of healing would not last over 5000 years if it weren’t effective. 100% of my practice is referral. If I don’t have good, solid, measurable results with my patients, they won’t tell their friends, families and colleagues, and I wouldn’t have a successful practice. There are over 20,000 practicing acupuncturists in this country, and the number is increasing every year. Acupuncture is integrated in hospitals in the United Kingdom, France and Germany as well as Korea, China, Japan and countless other countries. Most of the major health insurance companies in America cover acupuncture services. Actuarians are statisticians employed by insurance companies and they correlate data to reach conclusions such as “It takes an average of 6 acupuncture treatments to solve cluster headaches in an adult population between 35 and 50 years old.” If the statisticians found that other forms of health management were more effective or less costly than acupuncture, there would be no coverage in their plans.
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This argument would only convince anyone, if it were based on solid evidence. Sadly the best data we have today do not suggest that acupuncture is cost-effective.
Just look to astrology for a parallel example: completely false, scientifically disproven, and nonsensical (even on the "common sense" level) - yet it has been around for ~5000 years and some people still believe their horoscopes.
There's no sense in venerating a prescientific belief merely because it's old, and even less sense in holding onto it despite careful science that shows it to be false.
Human recollection and perception are notoriously fallible and easily fooled or distorted. Anecdote in the absence of research can be taken with a grain of salt, but choosing anecdote over the results of carefully controlled study is plainly foolish.
You make a good point with astrology - but modern science has not thrown out all of human endevour and learning. For most of human history most of our endevours have been based upon empirical trial and error and accumulated experience over generations. Humans have been farming for thousands of years and people have become very skilled at this. Scientific method may show up some false ideas, but if the main part of this body of knowledge was not reasonably sound we would presumably have starved to death by now. So why should traditional medicine not similarlly be given a reasonable benefit of the doubt?
As I said above, in the absence of research or prior scientific investigation, you can take a plausible yet untested old idea with a grain of salt - there might be something to it. However, it's folly to carefully test an idea, find experimental results wanting, note that it is based on pre-scientific ideas which have elsewhere been disproven, and yet still give more weight to anecdote than to the careful research.
No one has ever died for lack of acupuncture; with interventions that are safe but not effective, the historical record doesn't have anything so obvious to point to as "hey look, we're still alive, so it must work."
Remember, research is experience too - in fact, it's superior experience when done right, because we put effort into being accurate, reducing confusion, and accounting for as many complicating factors as possible. Yet many people continue to give more weight to their personal "experience" which is a tangled, unexamined mass of hearsay, confounded situtations, and data recalled from the notoriously faulty human memory. It's astounding.
A few years ago a number of editors of medical journals wrote an open letter expressing concern about the way the reduction of public funding, and the greater emphasis on pharmaceutical company funding was skewing results of trials and studies. This was what I meant in an earlier posting by 'politics' being a factor. Double blind controlled trials are not a foolproof system because they are done by human beings, if people can skew their results (consciously or unconsciously) in order to please a drug company then they can presumably be skewed by beliefs and expectations. Studies have been done that prove one thing and others get opposite results - last year cardiologists were very upset to hear that 30,000 operations a month(?) done preventatively for asymptomatic patients were not effective at preventing heart attack. So I just do not consider these to be the last word on whether acupuncture works.