I just became aware of the claim by some proponents of acupuncture that the existence of the interstitium explains acupuncture scientifically. The New York Times published an article recently which unforgivably promotes this claim, and I've found many other articles which contain some incoherent form of this bizarre and unjustified claim.

The article Research Methodology in Acupuncture for Managing Interstitial Cystitis/Bladder Pain Syndrome: A Scoping Review points out the severe flaws that infect nearly all studies of acupuncture and the interstitium. It calls out articles similar to Interstitial fluid transport in linea alba is involved in acupuncture-induced attenuation of ovarian hypofunction in aged rats for improper controls, tiny sample sizes, possible irrelevance to humans, and other major issues. None of these problems have deterred acupuncture enthusiasts from conducting biased and invalid research in the past, and they surely won't in the future because these enthusiasts are aware that acupuncture cannot survive a solid scientific examination.

Popular acupuncture articles such as The Internal-Stitching and the Interstitium and "Interstitium": Can this new Organ explain Acupuncture? contain either no actual explanation of how acupuncture works via the interstitium or speculation (piezoelectric effects, removal of so-called blockages, somehow influencing homeostasis, etc.) unsupported by any real evidence. They do this because acupuncture doesn't work via the interstitium or anything else. A common contention made in these articles is that practitioners of acupuncture have known about the interstitium for up to 5000 years. Nonsense. Actually, practitioners of acupuncture have known nothing for 5000 years.

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