Objective. This study aims to give a profile of discomfort and acceptability of acupuncture, including the prevalence and association with demographic and acupuncture-related factors. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted in Beijing, China. Outpatients of acupuncture and moxibustion departments were recruited using purposive sampling. 925 subjects were interviewed with an anonymous que...

Chemotherapy-induced leukopenia and neutropenia are common side effects during cancer treatment. Acupuncture has been reported as an adjunct therapy for this complication. The current study reviewed published randomized controlled trials of acupuncture's effect and explored the acupuncture parameters used in these trials. We searched biomedical databases in English and Chinese from 1979 to 2004...

Acupuncture in combination with antiretroviral therapies is a potentially useful treatment for HIVrelated symptom relief in resource-poor settings. Traditional Chinese medicine has a long history of being used to enhance immune function. In the setting of HIV, Chinese traditional medicine allows for symptom treatment without adding extra medications to a complex drug regime. This paper provides...

Purpose Community acupuncture is a recent innovation in acupuncture service delivery that provides low-cost treatments in group-based settings. Recent data suggests improved access to acupuncture through the community acupuncture model. However, there is a paucity of research on quality of care provided at community acupuncture clinics. The aim of this study was to assess patients’ perspectives...

As an alternative and complement to conventional or allopathic medicine, acupuncture has become a firmly established therapy in many countries. Despite this wide acceptance, the question of how acupuncture works, or whether it works at all, remains the subject of lively debate. One problem in the discussion of acupuncture and its possible mechanisms is that acupuncture is not only used for the ...

Results Of 237 initially located articles, three RCTs conducted in China on 336 patients in total were included. Because of high or uncertain risk of bias (particularly in domains including allocation concealment, patient or assessor blinding and selective outcome reporting) data could not be combined in a meta-analysis. All three RCTs measured how many patients had improved. One compared deep ...

Introduction Osteoarthritis (OA) is the commonest joint disease, with many patients having persistent disability due to pain and stiffness. Analgesic and anti-inflammatory therapy is limited by side effects and not all patients are adequately controlled with lifestyle changes. Reports of the therapeutic and analgesic effects of acupuncture in OA have stimulated interest in acupuncture as comple...