ABSTRACT
Through analyzing the indication distribution of the different acupoints located at the upper limbs recorded in
Subject(s)
Humans , Acupuncture Points , Arm , Goiter , Meridians , Tuberculosis, Lymph NodeABSTRACT
Chinese materia medica (CMM) is a complex system, which has characteristics of multiple components, diversity efficacy, and unpredictable relation among components, etc. Thus, constructing the quality evaluation and quality control model based on multi-disciplinary and multi-source information fusion is an innovative research idea for quality standards of CMM. The quality control system should been fully established to cover quality integrity and efficacy specificity of CMM based on the core concept of quality marker. Traditional quality assessment methods based on characteristic feature, chemical analysis including multiple chemical components and elementary substances, and biological evaluation were integrated by data fusion methods in this system. The correlation of the organic and elemental components with the specific effects should be established in order to verify the material basis. Finally, the Q-markers (including potential elemental Q-markers) with unique characteristics relevant to specific effect were analyzed and defined. The integrated quality indexes of Q-markers relevant to specific effect were calculated. This proposed integrated quality control system based on multi-source information fusion methods would enrich and perfect the quality evaluation of CMM.
ABSTRACT
Even though a large amount of researches showing the clinical effectiveness of acupuncture, there are the researches indicating the absent difference between acupuncture and sham-acupuncture (placebo), which provides the doubts on the specificity of acupuncture. It may be considered that acupuncture intervention is complica-ted and may produce unique non-specific effect, which results in the failure to evaluate effectively the acupuncture efficacy. The influential factors of the non-specific effect of acupuncture include the interaction between physician and patient, expectancy, physician authority, acupuncture treatment experiences, etc. It may be also relevant with the anticipated biological effect, Hawthorne effect, Pavlovian conditioned reflex, etc.