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By no stretch of the imagination has acupuncture been proven effective. You can't even get various practitioners to agree on which points do what things or which diseases are amenable to treatment.
Similarly with most "herbal" treatments. If they had been proven effective (or more effective than chemo) every doctor would be more than happy to use them. The best that you get with most "alternative" treatments is simple anecdotes or hype from the practitioners. Now, there is certainly more evidence that acupuncture does something sometimes than for other therapies (such as homeopathy; at least acupuncture involves a physical change in the body) but
attempts at scientific validation are extremely muddled and most trials that show significant positive results have been of questionable methodology (not properly double-blinded, for example) or too small to allow for statistically significant results.
This doesn't even begin to exmaine that the underlying theory of acupuncture relies on a mystical energy force that has never been detected (and by some claims is outside the realm of what can be detected).
What I don't understand is that people would throw a fit if Merck put out a drug saying "it does X but we having actually done any tests that prove it" but because some Congressman got the "herbal supplement" market exempted from FDA coverage Spam Emailer X can say "it does X and we'll like about actually having done any tests that prove it" and everybody eats it up.
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