Surprisingly, I think your heuristic may have failed this time! Acupunture is pseudoscience and you would normally be right to disregard it, but in this case what Gokhale does for her day job seems entirely irrelevant. This is an article about real science that happens to have been done by a pseudoscientist. It would be a mistake to let her sketchy profession distract you from her legitimate work.

Gokhale might as well have been a paralegal or an engineer. She is an acupuncturist who had recurring back pain that surgery didn't fix, so she went looking for a different answer in a relatively scientific way. She made observations, formed hypotheses, and tested them. It seems they were informal tests and not clinical trials, and one might argue that more research is needed to justify her conclusions, but at least there's standing to have a conversation. Even bad science is can be productively discussed and criticized -- a low bar that pseudoscience fails to cross. The fact that this science was does by a pseudoscientist shouldn't detract from the actual work.

I'm actually surprised the article isn't more about the acupuncturist who is doing real science than about the particular details of the work. That's the most interesting aspect, and it's not even mentioned explicitly as far as I can tell.