Guidelines as Topic

Our understanding of the relationship between physical activity and health is constantly evolving. Therefore, the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences convened a panel of experts to review the literature and produce guidelines that health professionals might use. In the ABC of Physical Activity for Health, A is for All healthy adults, B is for Beginners, and C is for Conditioned individuals.

OBJECTIVE: To provide health care providers, patients, and the general public with a responsible assessment of currently available data on vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC).

Expert opinion in child abuse has received considerable bad press and currently public confidence in this area of medical practice is low. Media interest has focused most on the diagnosis of factitious illness. However doctors who examine children in respect of proceedings arising from suspected sexual abuse should be mindful this area is potentially just as problematic. Widely different rates of abnormal findings have been reported. At least in part this has reflected inconsistency in interpretation.

Acupuncture treatment and control group interventions in parallel-group randomized trials of acupuncture are not always precisely reported. In an attempt to improve standards, an international group of experienced acupuncturists and researchers devised a set of recommendations, designating them STRICTA: STandards for Reporting Interventions in Controlled Trials of Acupuncture. In a further consensus-building round, the editors of several journals helped redraft the recommendations.

Acupuncture treatment and control group interventions in parallel-group randomised trials of acupuncture are not always precisely reported. In an attempt to improve standards, an international group of experienced acupuncturists and researchers devised a set of recommendations, designating them STRICTA: STandards for Reporting Interventions in Controlled Trials of Acupuncture. In a further consensus-building round, the editors of several journals helped redraft the recommendations.

Acupuncture treatment and control group interventions in parallel-group randomised trials of acupuncture are not always precisely reported. In an attempt to improve standards, an international group of experienced acupuncturists and researchers devised a set of recommendations, designating them STRICTA: STandards for Reporting Interventions in Controlled Trials of Acupuncture. In a further consensus-building round, the editors of several journals helped redraft the recommendations.

BACKGROUND: The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is considered the 'gold standard' methodology for evaluating efficacy of an intervention. It has been argued that RCTs cannot be used to examine the effectiveness of acupuncture. PURPOSE: The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of an RCT study design for acupuncture research. FINDINGS: RCTs would be more effective in studying acupuncture if study participants were randomized to groups based on the acupuncture diagnosis and not solely on the Western diagnostic criteria.

OBJECTIVE: To inform the potential revision of Standards for Reporting Interventions in Controlled Trials of Acupuncture (STRICTA), we sought the opinion of acupuncture trial authors and systematic reviewers to rank the utility of the guidelines and asked trial authors about their experiences using them. DESIGN: Questionnaires ranking STRICTA items and qualitative responses about experience using the guidelines.

To evaluate the efficacy of acupuncture scientifically and objectively is a major issue for the development of acupuncture medicine. Although some progresses have already been gained in the research of the evaluation of clinical therapeutic effects of acupuncture at present, some problems as empirical evaluation method, following evaluation indexes of Western medicine, poorer quality of evaluation studies, etc. still exist.

OPINION STATEMENT: Current technology suggests that acupuncture modulates neurological processes within the central nervous system, especially the spinal cord gating mechanisms, cerebral subcortical nuclei, and the hypothalamic-endocrine axis. Many single arm clinical studies report the effectiveness of acupuncture for controlling symptoms in cancer patients. However, the challenge has been to separate the nonspecific effects of the practitioner, as well as regression to the mean, from the neurophysiological effects of needle penetration.