RE: Chinese Pseudoscience #1: Acupuncture 针刺 - Part 2: Research
I find all of this highly unlikely, but I'd be open to reading where you're getting this information from.
As far as I've learnt over my life, Qi can be used little more than a philosophy or meditative ideology perhaps.
I spent a few minutes on google and the best I found was this
It talks about how there has been scientific proof that these meridian pathways exist (that connect qi points), but looking at their source seems to be a very biased acupuncture website.
Checking their reference at the bottom takes me to 'X-ray phase-contrast CT imaging of the acupoints based on synchrotron radiation' Which I accessed on scihub, and without digging deeply into it:
'These samples were takenfrom adult white New Zealand rabbits.'
So it's another example there of misleading the public by saying scientists have proved meridians for acupuncture when really all they did is scan some rabbits.
I mean this is only one study, making it easy to pick apart, but that's the thing, all the 'proof' of these things that anybody can ever find are individual studies, which are further debunked by dozens or hundreds of others. If you can provide better, please do!
Well I am not even arguing on the level of statistical significance of (meta)studies or discussing whether bioelectromagnetism is a thing, just speculating how the whole concept could have emerged historically. Your source does look interesting though.
Judging from modern anatomy that it is safe to assume that particularly sensitive regions of the body like vertices of the nervous or viceral system exist (solar plex, the temples, etc.). As the display an evident high responsiveness to external stimuli (for instance a precise hit to the solar plex will most likely lead to some temporary incapacitation and is really not that pleasant), their significance has been known to both martial artists and medical practioners in the eastern hemisphere for a long time and people started to research this with the means available to them. While this is no strict evidence I also know from experience that e.g. masters of Ju-Jitsu, Kung Fu etc. do have a good intuitive understanding of orthopedy, being able to infer potential problems of joints just by studying your posture.
Whether you can actually derive a therapeutical approach from that was not really decidable for our pedecessors, just as our medical knowledge in medieval Europe was also quite limited, because they had no systematic medical research. So while there is a large esoteric framework surrounding acupuncture I would argue its origins are not necessarily pseudo-scientific, but rather contemporarily scientific.
Well its origins are discussed in part 1 which you should read if you haven't, since historically, even China dismissed it as rubbish and all the scholars they had pointed out that it didn't work hundreds of years ago.
Any success we've had with it since Mao used it for political gain has been entirely circumstantial. I can't say to understand martial arts to any degree but I can guarantee their intuitive ability to understand problems of posture comes from years of experience and knowledge of the physical body and its sensitive spots in general, rather than being spiritually connected with qi spots and meridian pathways.
If there's no evidence of these things, and any claim to use them to our benefit is proven false time and time again, or there is some slight benefit that is circumstantial with better results coming from alternative methods and even sham acupuncture, I don't see any reason to keep it alive. The fact that the effects can be replicated without even using the qi locations is one of the bigger nails in its coffin.
I'm still a little confused on what your stance on it is, to be honest, but the research has to be considered with these things no matter what one's position may be