And yet.... Tcm works...or at least it did on me. It was funny falling asleep stuck with needles.
All you've really 'proven' with this post is that that explanation for it's mechanism of action isn't correct. However there's a vast amount of clinical data showing the efficacy of TCM.
Rather than declaring 'psudeoscience', we should be trying to discover WHY it works (after satisfying ourselves that it does work of course).
Homeopathy "works" too but only by placebo effect. That's why the bodies that govern (peddle) homeopathy have declared science an invalid way to investigate homeopathy. Very convenient.
Maybe if it is the relaxing, feeling that someone is caring for you, and stress relief of getting "treatment" that is all psudo science does for you then we could find a better way to deliver that without all the hype and BS and without the risk of people eschewing far more effective treatments and ending up dead prematurely (we all die). I'm thinking of Steve Jobs, Bob Marley, Steve McQueen, Eben Byers, Barry Sheene, Sylvia Millecam, ...
It is pseudoscience because whether or not it works, it doesn't follow the scientific method even closely. It pretends, but it doesn't do. As shown above and in all the other episodes of this series, it doesn't go through the rigorous protocol of peer review, replication and scrutiny that real science has to adhere to.
Something working is irrelevant in this case; acupuncture has been shown to be just as effective if you replace needles with toothpicks that don't penetrate the skin and acupoints with random points all over the body. You could just as well say toothpick-ology is a science and that we just need to figure out why!
So yeah this is what we tend to mean when we say pseudoscience.
Yeah, the massive amount of pseudoscience around TCM makes it difficult to find actual objective research or justify research funding.