The efficacy and safety of cupping therapy for treating of intractable peripheral facial paralysis: A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Peripheral facial paralysis (PFP) is a common clinical neurological disease and the incidence of intractable peripheral facial paralysis is on the rise. Symptoms include crooked mouth and eyes, tearing and shallow nasolabial folds. The disease seriously affects the physical and mental health of patients. At present, a large number of clinical studies have shown that cupping is effective in treating intractable peripheral facial paralysis (IPFP). Therefore, the purpose of this review is to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of cupping in the treatment of refractory peripheral facial paralysis.

Methods: We will conduct a comprehensive and systematic search of relevant documents in the following databases: Medline, PubMed, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), Embase, Chinese Biomedical Literatures Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wang Fang Database, Chinese Scientific Journal Database from inception to February 2021 without any language restriction. The 2 reviewers will be independently completed select research, extract data, evaluate research quality and use the Cochrane risk of bias tool to assess methodological quality. Using revman5.4 software for statistical analysis. The degree of heterogeneity will be Determined through heterogeneity test, to definite whether to adopt a random effects model or a fixed-effects model.

Results: The protocol for the meta-analysis will systematically evaluate the efficacy and safety of cupping therapy for intractable peripheral facial paralysis patients.

Conclusion: This study will explore whether or not cupping therapy can be used as one of the non-drug therapies to prevent or treat intractable peripheral facial paralysis.