Abstracts des SAR Symposion in Minneapolis

Vom 19. – 20. Oktober 2001 fand im Pillsbury Auditorium, Hennepin County Medical Center, Minnesota das 8. jährliche Symposion der Society of Acupuncture Research statt. 
Das Kongressprogramm war wie 2000 bei dem Symposion in Baltimore hervorragend und fokussierte auf den aktuellen Stand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung zur Akupunktur.
Auch der aktuelle Stand der von den National Institutes of Health geförderten, klinischen Studien wurden in Vorträgen vorgestellt und diskutiert. Wie bereits in den letzten Monaten stellen wir an dieser Stelle die Abstracts des Symposiums als Serie hier ins Netz.
Hier den 8. Teil:

Jongbae Park, Hijoon Park, Hyejung Lee, Edzard Ernst
Department of Complementary Medicine, School of Postgraduate Medicine & Health Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Background: Traditional Chinese Medicine has been modified to some extent in other Far Eastern countries such as Korea and Japan. A significant number of the TCM literature was written in Chinese by Korean and Japanese authors in Korea and Japan. Researchers of each of the three countries seem to use different English names for the same formulae of Chinese medicine. Thus lack of phonetic knowledge of the Chinese characters is destined to increase this confusion in future.

Purpose: To investigate this matter systematically.

Methods: Hand search of all the articles published in the American Journal of Chinese Medicine (1998-2000) in order to identify all articles that reported the study of Chinese medicine formulae. Moreover, we conducted a computerized literature search in Medline (1990-February, 2001) using keywords differentiated by language, location and number of hyphens, and upper or lower case of the first letter of each Chinese character.

Results: 32 formulae of TCM were identified in 28 reports. 19 of them were named in Chinese (14 reports); five in Japanese (5 reports); and three in Korean (3 reports). Five formulae named in Japanese were given Chinese name in bracket. In two separate reports the same formulae were represented differently (i.e. the Japanese version and Chinese version). By computerized literature search, different numbers of literature were retrieved according to language, location and number of hyphen. Yet there was no difference by the size of character.

Conclusion: There are clear differences in the naming of Chinese medical formulae in English according to whether the language in the reports is Chinese, Japanese or Korean. This made a critical difference in the number of reports retrieved through computerized database search. Further inconsistency was found according to the location and number of hyphens that subdivided the unit of meaning. This is confusing and may prevent an accumulation of knowledge. To increase the efficiency of studies on Chinese medical formulae, the issue of standardizing needs to be addressed in detail.

Terry Oleson
Department of Psychology, California Graduate Institute, Los Angeles, CA

The proliferation of research studies examining the clinical efficacy of acupuncture treatments has led to a divergence of nomenclature for describing research designs that are utilized in acupuncture investigations. The basic structure of the "randomized controlled trial" has been well-established from other fields of study, but such aspects as the meaning of the words "sham" versus "placebo" treatments or "single blind" versus "modified double blind" have received inconsistent usage by different investigators. There is growing interest in promoting the use of prospective, systematic examination of patients receiving acupuncture or herbs that has been labeled "single case design," "treatment outcome studies," or "time series analyses." While some of these research issues apply to other fields besides acupuncture, some terms are specific to research investigations of Oriental medicine. The purpose of this presentation is to allow an interactive discussion of investigators active in the field of acupuncture research to arrive at a consensus of opinion regarding the most appropriate descriptive terms that should be used in future publications of acupuncture research.