Here's why *real* medicine is different than woo:

[Benton D Struckcheon]

6. Yup

Doctors guess, a lot.
If, for instance, you come in and they find bone cancer, what they right away know is that it isn't. Cancer in the bone is almost always an indication that there's cancer elsewhere, and they then have to go looking for the original source. Mostly, they guess.
My mom had clogged ears for a while. Cleaned em out, she'd come in again, they'd clean em out again. They kept looking for the cause of this constant clogging, couldn't find one. This went on for a year.
Finally, one day, she could hardly walk. It just happened to be on the first day we were visiting her for a week's vacation. We spent that vacation in the hospital. At the end they finally figured out what she had, but once again, a lot of guessing, and a lot of testing, took place in that week.
Now we know, but it was too late to keep her independent. She now has to live in an assisted living facility, because she can't move around much, and needs assistance in her everyday life. Enough so that it's cheaper to have her there than to use a nurse.
Had they found the cause earlier, she could still be independent. But there's a lot of guesswork in medicine, simply because so many symptoms are shared by so many diseases, and what is apparently wrong looking at the symptoms might be completely different from what's really going on.
Which means that, you know, the entire body is a single unit, and the whole thing reacts when it's sick. Which, you know, is the assumption on which acupuncture is built, just to take a fer instance.

However, it's not true that there's not much evidence for medicine vs woo. In medicine, testing is done, statistical means are used to verify the results, and so on. Corruption, though, is a large part of medicine, for the simple reason there's so much money spent on it. Where there's money, there's corruption, and that screws things up. But that's true for woo too, the diff being yer average woo-ster doesn't bother with controlled tests and statistics.
For acupuncture, there's evidence it helps with pain. Homeopathy though? Useless. Chiropractic? May maybe work on some lower back pain stuff, otherwise useless.
Herbal remedies have known effects and, importantly, known side-effects, so if you're into that stuff you should be checking on both.
Et cetera. Just about everything out there has been investigated. In truth, if you really want to stay as healthy as possible, keep away from red meat and milk, exercise regularly, be happy (a glass or two of wine/beer/you name it a day helps with that; and if you're in CO, you can even light up from time to time to get some assistance...) and that will have the best results. Most doctors these days would tell you exactly the same thing.