[jaredklewis]

I agree with you that the Grokipedia article is better here, though I guess I disagree that the wikipedia lead has "no neutrality" and is a "straight up ideological attack."

Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.

It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.

Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.

[incomingpain]

>I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience;

I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

It's a complex topic that doesn't have good conclusions and I chose it because I knew it would show their ideological bias. There's absolutely no reason to call it qwackery when it's not a settled subject. Perhaps even finish defining what it is before going on the attack.

>Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.

That's completely fair to come to the conclusion. My guess would be that you tend to also align with the ideology that wiki is written for.

[jaredklewis]

> The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.

Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.

I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is common for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.

So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.

[philipwhiuk]

> Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

This is the basically the same evidence that says if I set you on fire you'll stop complaining about a cough, right?

> qwackery

Quackery has a 'u'. Maybe you need Grammarly.

> Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.

Try not to source all your opinions from the guy who suggested people drink bleach.