Improvement of agreement in TCM diagnosis among TCM practitioners for persons with the conventional diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis: effect of training.

Objective: To investigate whether a training process that focused on consensus on Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnostic criteria will improve the agreement of TCM diagnosis on patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

Design: The design was a prospective survey.

Setting: The study was conducted at the General Clinical Research Center, University of Maryland Hospital System, Baltimore, MD.

Involvement of peripheral opioid mechanisms in electroacupuncture analgesia.

The involvement of the peripheral opioid system in modulating inflammatory pain has been well documented. This study aimed to investigate the possibility of electroacupuncture (EA)-mediated peripheral opioid release. Rats were injected with complete Freund's adjuvant in one of the hind paws to induce localized inflammatory pain.

Variability in the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) diagnoses and herbal prescriptions provided by three TCM practitioners for 40 patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Objective: To ascertain if previous findings of low levels of agreement of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) pattern diagnoses made by TCM practitioners in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) were a function of practitioner differences or would be replicated with a different sample of clinicians, and to examine the relationship between TCM diagnosis and herbal treatment plans.

Design: A prospective survey.

Setting: General clinical research center, University of Maryland Hospital System, Baltimore, MD.

The variability of TCM pattern diagnosis and herbal prescription on rheumatoid arthritis patients.

Context: The consistency of diagnosis made among Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners and the relationship between TCM diagnosis and Chinese herbal prescription have not been adequately examined.

Objective: To investigate the degree of consistency with which TCM diagnoses and herbal prescriptions can be made by practitioners examining rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients. To survey TCM diagnostic patterns and to examine the correlation between herbal prescriptions and these diagnoses for a sample of RA patients.

Assessing the consistency of traditional Chinese medical diagnosis: an integrative approach.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) differs from its Western counterpart in a number of ways. One of the more striking ways involves a conceptually oriented diagnostic system that relies more on the clinician's reading of the patient's symptoms and signs than on laboratory findings. Because highly individualized TCM treatment plans emanate directly from its diagnostic system, a necessary condition for conducting clinically relevant TCM efficacy trials rests on the answer to a simple question: How consistent are different TCM practitioners at making the same TCM diagnoses and prescribing comparable treatment regimens for the same group of patients? Unfortunately, this question has not been adequately investigated, nor has the related question: Could the TCM diagnostic process be enhanced by access to modern biomedical tests? The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to discuss a number of the conceptual and methodological issues involved in the design of a recently funded NIH study whose primary purpose is to address these 2 questions.