Chinese Medicine is based on the concept of Qi. The ancient character of Qi looks like this 氣 and is composed of two parts: the lower one is 米 Mi meaning rice, and material, while the upper one is Qi 气 – air or gas, and shows vapours arising from the pot of boiling rice. There are many layers of meaning simultaneously shown by character Qi. It is something nourishing, and something which has material and non-material forms. It is impossible to translate this complex idea into any Western language without losing at least a part of meaning. The most popular translation of Qi is energy, while more appropriate is breath or vapour.
According to ancient books this Qi influences all functions of the body and is transported through the body by special conduits compared to channels build in China in order to control rivers and irrigate fields. What is interesting, those channels are described as functional, not material. They are said to exist between muscles, bones, and tissues not being muscles bones nor tissues.
Certainly this concept was not understood by Western scholars who went to China in the XVII century and later. Western science was built on materialism and reductionism, so ideas describing functions not forms couldn’t be accepted. When British scholar William Wotton saw the drawings explaining the routes of channels he falsely pre-assumed they were anatomic drawings and criticized Chinese Medicine for not being scientific.
Beginning from that misunderstanding Western scholars have been still trying to find material, anatomical or histological structures helping them in explanation of extraordinary effectiveness of acupuncture, even when it’s applied to points located far away from the place of dysfunction . In fact they found many valuable clues and created few interesting theories concerning acupuncture points, channels, and transmission of acupuncture signal in the body.