Analysis And Evaluation Of SCI Acupuncture Literature In The Past Five Years

Acupuncture, containing the unique spirit of Chinese nation, Chinese thinking and Chinese culture, has played an important role in preventing and curing diseases since ancient China. Applauded by the whole world, Acupuncture researches become more and more popular, and go deeper and deeper. It has gained the attention of foreign medicine experts. Science Citation Index, SCI, as the most comprehensive publication for retrieve, has won the widespread attention of the scientific community. And it has lately been an important criterion for evaluating the academic research level of research workers. For these years more and more Acupuncture literatures have been collected by SCI, especially the clinical ones. More and more scientists attach importance to Acupuncture being as alternative and complementary treatment. In this thesis, we have made a systematic summarization of SCI Acupunctures literatures in the past five years. We attempt to give an objective analyzation and evaluation of the research methods foreign scientists has applied, so that we can have an overall understand of the development of Acupuncture in the world, so that we could know its existing problems and shortcomings, so that we domestic Acupunturists have a clear understanding of our own strengths and weaknesses. Then in the future's study, we can submit a perfect science and technology paper related to Acupuncture, so make a better way to the world for our precious excellent heritage.Methods:We searched two databases:Web of Science and PubMed and "acupuncture" were used for searching SCI foreign acupuncture literatures from2007to2011.The following were excluded:literatures collected by domestic SCI journals; non-English language literatures; proceedings papers, letter, editorial material, meeting abstract, review, news item and correction type of literature; Laser acupuncture and Auricular acupuncture; the ones that we were unable to obtain the full text. We included whole of those that meets our standards. We made a preliminary statistics on what we finally retrieved and focused on clinical literatures. We made a summarization and analysis in the aspects of the contacts, the diseases, the objectives, results,the chosen acupoints, acupuncture manipulation and the measurements. Also we assessed the methodologic quality of the trials from three aspects, randomized, controlled and blinded.Results:1Foreign SCI acupuncture literature shows an increasing trend on number from2007to2011.Clinical literature takes the majority, having51%of the total volume while the mechanism literature just takes17%.The diseases and symptoms foreigners had studied reached more than40and involved48subjects categories, but still the painfull diseases are the most.2Foreign SCI clinical acupuncture literature usually verifis the clinical efficacy of acupuncture to treat certain diseases or campares with other therapists in treatment of a certain disease. Randomized, controlled and blinded trials are used in their clinical studying, especially explanatory randomized controlled trial.3The essence of the dialectical classification of Traditional Chinese Medicine haven't been seen in the foreign SCI clinical acupuncture literatures. Neither we found any descriptions on the location of acupoints and the acupuncture manipulation. As to the depth of acupuncture, some told shallow needling and some had not involved that.4The results of foreign SCI clinical study show acupuncture has a superiority to other therapies such as medication, usual care and physiotherapy, while comparing to sham acupuncture it has no significant better effect, but only taken as placebo effect.5Measurement outcome is so different that a unified standard is pretty nessesary.Discussion:1Acupuncture technique in western world still belongs to Complementary and alternative medicine. Acupuncture research in SCI is still have a long way to go with clinical research most and experimental research less.2The exit problem of foreign SCI acupuncture clinical trials in methodology are as follows: Randomization is not clear and allocation is not described concealed which leads to the presence of a high selection bias.Sham acupuncture or placebo used as control is kind of unreasonable design. Inadequate blind brings bias both in practice and inspect.Therefore, the quality of the clinical literatures of the foreign SCI acupuncture is generally low.And it is unreasonable and unscientific to compliance with the requirements of evidence-based medicine indesigning RCT of acupuncture.3The study of clinical research of SCI acupuncture-related literatures lacks differentiation or dialectical classification of traditional Chinese medicine. They do not have a systematic understanding of Acupuncture or TCM. They do not really get the essence of "dredge main and collateral channels, regulating Qi and Blood".4Comparing two kinds of RCT, pragmatic RCT is more suitable for clinical acupuncture study with complex intervention as its characteristic, because Pragmatic RCT has advantages of high external accuracy, flexible clinical applications, individual therapy programs and takes the overall quality of life as one of indexes for measurement. It seems that pragmatic RCT is a better way to show the clinical feature and healing effect of acupuncture and to tell the nature of acupuncture. And they have not attached enough importance of the acupuncturis's skill to the outcomes.