There's about as much conflict of interest here as an oil company's study disproving global warming.

Sham acupuncture is as valid as the real thing, so either the mere act of piercing with needles (rather than actual acupuncture) is efficacious, or the placebo efect is at work: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19250001

We Chinese cannot emulate what the Indians have done with Ayurveda and claim superstitions to be medicine. Nationalistic hype cannot make its own reality for long.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/acupunctures-big-myth/

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/traditional-chinese-pseudo-medicine-hodgepodge/