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Acupuncture: archaic or biologic?

The article “Exploring Acupuncture: Ancient Ideas, Modern Techniques” in the October Journal describes stimulation with “lowvoltage electricity, laser beams, and sonar rays.”1 This description suggests that replacing needles with modern techniques of stimulation is evidence that acupuncture has become scientific. However, this inference is wrong, for as the article points out acupuncturists believe their treatments bring about health by affecting a mysterious life energy, qi, flowing through hypothetical meridians. Acupuncture theory is generally described in terms of philosophical concepts like yin and yang and a magical 5 elements, which are simply part of superstitious Chinese number magic. Such prescientific metaphysical explanations of traditional Chinese acupuncture have changed but little since their formulation more than 3 000 years ago. During the 1960s, this largely placebo practice found ready acceptance in the United States by New Age practitioners, along with other shaman practices of alternative medicine.