"Bringing greater research fluency into our educational vision": A qualitative research study on improving Traditional Chinese Medicine research education.

The main objective of this qualitative analysis is to increase the quality of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) research education. Subject matter experts and stakeholders were sent a list of possible topics to include in a research course and were asked to comment on it, add or subtract topics, and suggest appropriate research papers to use, lessons learned in their topic areas and possible stand-alone topics for inclusion in other courses. Their feedback was used to revise the topic list, create a list of foundational research papers to include in a research course and devise a list of stand-alone topics that could be included in the general TCM research curriculum.

The State of 21st Century Acupuncture in the United States.

The term "acupuncture" commonly refers to a non-pharmacologic therapy that is increasingly employed by diverse segments of the population for a wide variety of complaints including pain, insomnia, anxiety, depression, frozen shoulder, and other issues. The term is also used as a short-hand for the wider medical system from which the placement of needles into the skin for therapeutic benefit and related techniques evolved. Thus "acupuncture" refers both to the therapeutic technique and the therapeutic system of Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine (AHM).

2021 American Society of Acupuncturists Survey on Acupuncturists' Backgrounds, Interests, and Attitudes toward Conducting Research.

Background: It has been previously reported that acupuncturists internationally can be reluctant to engage in acupuncture research.

Purpose: Assess the beliefs and attitudes of acupuncturists in the United States toward research, along with exploring their backgrounds and interests regarding conducting acupuncture research. We aimed to capture any previous experiences in conducting research, applying research findings in their clinical practice, and their ideas on how research could be used to promote the profession.

RETRACTED: Abou-Donia et al. Sex-Based Differences in Plasma Autoantibodies to Central Nervous System Proteins in Gulf War Veterans versus Healthy and Symptomatic Controls. 2021, , 148.

The Editorial Office retracts the article, "Sex-Based Differences in Plasma Autoantibodies to Central Nervous System Proteins in Gulf War Veterans versus Healthy and Symptomatic Controls" [...

Midlife Women's Menopausal Transition Symptom Experience and Access to Medical and Integrative Health Care: Informing the Development of MENOGAP.

Background: Individuals with a uterus experience menopause, the cessation of menses, on average at age 51 years in the United States. While menopause is a natural occurrence for most, over 85% of women experience multiple interfering symptoms. Menopausal women face health disparities, including a lack of access to high-quality healthcare and greater disparities are experienced by women who are black, indigenous, and people of color.

Are They Side Effects? Extraintestinal Symptoms Reported During Clinical Trials of Irritable Bowel Syndrome May Be More Severe at Baseline.

Background & Aims: Many of the reported adverse events in clinical trials of irritable bowel syndrome are extraintestinal symptoms, which typically are assessed by open-ended questions during the trial and not at baseline. This may lead to misattribution of some pre-existing symptoms as side effects to the treatment.

Methods: The current study analyzed data from a 6-week clinical trial of irritable bowel syndrome.

Patients' experiences treated with open-label placebo versus double-blind placebo: a mixed methods qualitative study.

Background: There is increasing evidence suggesting that open-label placebo (OLP) is an effective treatment for several medical conditions defined by self-report. However, little is known about patients' experiences with OLP, and no studies have directly compared patients' experiences in double-blind placebo (DBP) conditions.

Methods: This study was nested in a large randomized-controlled trial comparing the effects of OLP and DBP treatments in individuals with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

SEAttle-based Research of Chinese Herbs for COVID-19 Study: A Whole Health Perspective on Chinese Herbal Medicine for Symptoms that may be Related to COVID-19.

Introduction: East Asian Medicine (EAM) is a Whole System medicine that includes Chinese herbal medicine (CHM). Chinese herbal medicine has been utilized to reduce symptom burden in infectious disease, with notable theoretical reformulations during pandemics of the 3rd, 13th, and 17th centuries. Today, Licensed Acupuncturists trained in CHM have utilized it to treat symptoms and sequelae of COVID-19.

Latent Factor Decomposition Model: Applications for Questionnaire Data.

The analysis of clinical questionnaire data comes with many inherent challenges. These challenges include the handling of data with missing fields, as well as the overall interpretation of a dataset with many fields of different scales and forms. While numerous methods have been developed to address these challenges, they are often not robust, statistically sound, or easily interpretable.

Internalized weight stigma and intuitive eating among stressed adults during a mindful yoga intervention: associations with changes in mindfulness and self-compassion.

Purpose: Internalized weight stigma (IWS) is common in the United States of America across body weight categories, and is implicated in the development of distress and unhealthy eating behaviors (e.g. overeating, disordered eating) that can foster poor cardiometabolic health.

Intuitive eating buffers the link between internalized weight stigma and body mass index in stressed adults.

Internalized weight stigma (IWS) is independently associated with less intuitive eating (i.e., eating based on endogenous hunger/satiety cues) and higher Body Mass Index (BMI), and intuitive eating training is commonly conceptualized as protective against the effects of IWS on poor behavioral health.

Diagnosis of Gulf War Illness Using Laser-Induced Spectra Acquired from Blood Samples.

Gulf War illness (GWI) is a chronic illness with no known validated biomarkers that affects the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. As a result, there is an urgent need for the development of an untargeted and unbiased method to distinguish GWI patients from non-GWI patients. We report on the application of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to distinguish blood plasma samples from a group of subjects with GWI and from subjects with chronic low back pain as controls.

Yoga participation associated with changes in dietary patterns and stress: A pilot study in stressed adults with poor diet.

Background And Purpose: Stress contributes to dietary patterns that impede health. Yoga is an integrative stress management approach associated with improved dietary patterns in burgeoning research. Yet, no research has examined change in dietary patterns, body mass index (BMI), and stress during a yoga intervention among stressed adults with poor diet.

Sex-Based Differences in Plasma Autoantibodies to Central Nervous System Proteins in Gulf War Veterans versus Healthy and Symptomatic Controls.

Veterans from the 1991 Gulf War (GW) have suffered from Gulf War illness (GWI) for nearly 30 years. This illness encompasses multiple body systems, including the central nervous system (CNS). Diagnosis and treatment of GWI is difficult because there has not been an objective diagnostic biomarker.

Using Plasma Autoantibodies of Central Nervous System Proteins to Distinguish Veterans with Gulf War Illness from Healthy and Symptomatic Controls.

For the past 30 years, there has been a lack of objective tools for diagnosing Gulf War Illness (GWI), which is largely characterized by central nervous system (CNS) symptoms emerging from 1991 Gulf War (GW) veterans. In a recent preliminary study, we reported the presence of autoantibodies against CNS proteins in the blood of veterans with GWI, suggesting a potential objective biomarker for the disorder. Now, we report the results of a larger, confirmatory study of these objective biomarkers in 171 veterans with GWI compared to 60 healthy GW veteran controls and 85 symptomatic civilian controls ( = 50 myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and = 35 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS)).

"Honorable Toward Your Whole Self": Experiences of the Body in Fatigued Breast Cancer Survivors.

Introduction: Cancer Related Fatigue (CRF) is one of the most common and detrimental side effects of cancer treatment. Despite its increasing prevalence and severity CRF remains dismissed by the majority of clinicians. One reason for the apparent gap between clinical need and clinical undertaking is the penchant toward reductionist accounts of the disorder: a tendency to discount the interface between the lived experience of sufferers and the multi-dimensional etiology of CRF as it manifests adversely on a day-to-day basis.

Efficacy of medium chain triglyceride oil dietary supplementation in reducing seizure frequency in dogs with idiopathic epilepsy without cluster seizures: a non-blinded, prospective clinical trial.

Background: Despite appropriate antiseizure drug (ASD) treatment, around two-thirds of dogs with idiopathic epilepsy (IE) have seizures long-term and 20-30per cent of affected dogs remain poorly controlled.

Methods: The current study aim is to test in a field trial the efficacy and tolerability of a commercially available diet enriched with 6.5per cent medium chain triglyceride (MCT) oil in dogs (n=21) with at least a tier 1 idiopathic epilepsy diagnosis, without cluster seizures, in 10 veterinary practices across Europe.

In-vivo imaging of neuroinflammation in veterans with Gulf War illness.

Gulf War Illness (GWI) is a chronic disorder affecting approximately 30% of the veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War. It is characterised by a constellation of symptoms including musculoskeletal pain, cognitive problems and fatigue. The cause of GWI is not definitively known but exposure to neurotoxicants, the prophylactic use of pyridostigmine bromide (PB) pills, and/or stressors during deployment have all been suspected to play some pathogenic role.

Experimental Studies of Inter-Rater Agreement in Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Systematic Review.

It has been recommended that clinical trials of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) would be more ecologically valid if its characteristic mode of diagnostic reasoning were integrated into their design. In that context, however, it is also widely held that demonstrating a high level of agreement on initial TCM diagnoses is necessary for the replicability that the biomedical paradigm requires for the conclusions from such trials. Our aim was to review, summarize, and critique quantitative experimental studies of inter-rater agreement in TCM, and some of their underlying assumptions.