Problems lowering the study quality in traditional medicine, introspection from an example of meta-analysis of acupuncture.,BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

当前位置： X-MOL 学术 › BMC Complement. Altern. Med. › 论文详情

Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)

Problems lowering the study quality in traditional medicine, introspection from an example of meta-analysis of acupuncture.
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine Pub Date : 2020-02-11 , DOI: 10.1186/s12906-019-2806-z
Qiliang Chen ₁ , Qiong Wang ₂ , Shanshan Ding ₁ , Shunan Li ₁ , Yuanyuan Zhang ₁ , Shujiao Chen ₁ , Xuejuan Lin ₁ , Candong Li ₁ , Tetsuya Asakawa _{1,

3}

Affiliation

BACKGROUND Most randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of traditional medicine (such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), psychotherapy or behavioral therapy, and dietary interventions, etc.) have reported that they could not provide convincing evidence to support the efficacy because of the low quality of their studies. Here, we aimed to determine the underlying problems of the study quality using standards of evidence-based medicine (EBM) to evaluate the efficacy of traditional medicine. METHODS We conducted an example of meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy of acupuncture, a classical treatment of TCM, for treatment of intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). The quality of the included studies was evaluated by using a Jadad score. RESULTS A total of 24 Chinese RCTs that enrolled 1815 patients with ICH were included. Although the results suggested that acupuncture had good efficacy for relief of neurological deficits and improvement of the activities of daily living despite the high heterogeneity of the included studies, the low quality of the included literature reduced the worthiness of the evidence. Two systematic problems (lack of blinding and allocation concealment and high heterogeneity) and one non-systematic problem (lack of reports on adverse events and follow-up) of the TCM studies were found in this illustrational meta-analysis. We believed that other interventions of traditional medicine also suffer from these problems. CONCLUSIONS Non-systematic problems can be improved by perfecting the experimental design, educating the researcher, and improving the reporting system. However, systematic problems are derived from the characteristics of traditional medicine that are difficult to be corrected. We propose that adoption of objective indexes might be a better solution to improve the systematic problems of traditional medicine. We summarized the problems and the underlying solutions, which may contribute to improve the study quality of systematic review in traditional medicine, strictly complying with the principles of EBM.

更新日期：2020-03-19

点击分享查看原文

点击收藏

公开下载

阅读更多本刊最新论文本刊介绍/投稿指南11