health insurance companies paying for acupuncture says a great deal about whether or not it works in practice.

Well, I never said it didn't work, just that it was BS. The placebo effect is a very real and powerful thing, and acupuncture works under that premise and that alone - this doesn't justify all the falsehood behind it giving people false hope and misunderstanding of the importance of real medicine.Here's a post I did about how negligence of this nature will and does historically end up with dead people including a girl who died at 26 after trusting acupuncture other forms of bloodletting until they realised it wasn't doing anything and it was too late for real treatment.

book on this subject is called Spark in the Machine,,,the piezoelectric properties of the collagen component of the organic fascia tissue

I will indeed pay attention to this and perhaps write a post about it in the next episode or the one after, whichever makes sense, no space in a comment to dig into such things!

All the really effective drugs we have are analogs of naturally occurring treatments

The difference is TCM on the whole has been born from simple and primitive trial and error, which as we know in our own western Victorian times and beyond has horrible results. China has certainly killed far more than it has saved over the millennia trying out various concoctions of poison based on the logic of 'fire beats fire'.

The difference with actual medicine is that we first test and understand, then isolate the active component, make it safe, test it repeatedly and release - all through legitimate scientific method.

None of that is applied to TCM (In fact it's sold not as medicine, allowing it to go around numerous safety loopholes)

So sure some TCM after killing millions of people comes out positive, but it takes modern medicine and researchers to understand why and maximise its potential and manufacture alternatives and so on, without a single death (usually).

that's the best explanation I've seen for why acupuncture works.

The best explanation to me is the placebo effect. It's a great painkiller but, like chiropody, it's a temporary band-aid in more chronic cases and conditions that go beyond just 'pain relief'. Placebo DOES do this, and sometimes it CAN help you fight certain low level infections or disease - but this is because your body is already capable of doing this on its own in the right state.

Give yourself a bit of cancer, diabetes, HIV, meningitis, alzheimers, TB, Cholera, Polio etc and you'll dull the pain right up until your death a week later.

Yet China claims this and the rest of TCM have no less than a 95% average success of curing such things in their 'studies'.

If research scientists can't corroborate this effect - its because they don't really want to

On the contrary, All the research is extremely biased towards TCM across all of Asia, India and so forth and in some cases in the west too. It's when you actually dig into the study yourself and start picking it apart you really get to see the hidden turds within.

Anyway as I said I may add a post with your recommendation, cheers for that =)