ABSTRACT
The modern medicine in Japan made a remarkable progress according to development of Western medicine and further studies made it possible to understand almost of all diseases as cell and gene abnormalities using scientific approach such as imaging diagnosis or blood biochemistry. Kampo medicine, on the other hand, developed especially in Japan and is defined as holistic medicine because many diseases can be induced by responses of whole body against various causes instead of cell or organ abnormalities.<br>Recently EBM (Evidence based medicine) is required in the clinical field.<br>Though the evidence cannot be obtained easily in the clinical field, the concept of EBM seems to be important in achieving clinical practice even from the stand view point of cost-benefit and many trials began to accept this EBM in the field of Western medicine.<br>On the other hand, usefulness of Kampo medicine on various diseases was elucidated by means of Western analysis such as double blind test and the “Shou”, unique diagnostic method for Kampo medicine, turned out not to be necessary in all cases for the best treatment. Doctors engaging in Kampo medicine began to change their attitude to accept EBM by their newly considered method including conventional “Shou”<br>Both medicines, Western and Kampo medicine, have various features and merits or demerits for the treatment of diseases respectively. Therefore, a trial to combine Kampo and Western medicine should be taken into consideration, to improve the clinical practice.
ABSTRACT
The first Japan-Korea workshop on acupuncture and EBM was held on June 4, 2004 at Chiba in the 53rd annual scientific meeting of the JSAM. The purpose of this workshop was to exchange the experiences of clinical researches on acupuncture and moxibustion therapies, and to find out the issues and their solutions for developing the excellent clinical research to establish strong evidence. The final purpose was to develop aprotocol for the collaborative work between both countries.<BR>Drs. Kawakita (JSAM) and Jang (KAMS) chaired the workshop. Three speakers from Japan (Drs Takahashi, Nabeta, and Tsukayama) and three Korean speakers (Drs Seo, Lee and Moon) presented their data on the clinical researches of acupuncture, moxibustion and bee-venom injection. After their paper presentations, various issues were discussed on their research methodology for establishing more strong evidence of acupuncture.We got interesting new findings and understood various issues for conducting clinical researches especially RCT.<BR>Although we could not develop a protocol for the collaborative research in this workshop, it was very fruitful workshop as the first step for the future Japan-Korea collaborative clinical study. The most important product of this workshop was we could understand each other and we confirmed the necessity of the future collaborative clinical research on acupuncture.