Bmc Complem Altern M
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Bmc Complem Altern M · Jan 2012
Attitudes toward integrative paediatrics: a national survey among youth health are physicians in The Netherlands.
Integrative Medicine (IM) is an emerging field in paediatrics, especially in the USA. The purpose of the present study was to assess the attitudes and beliefs of Youth Health Care (YHC) physicians in the Netherlands toward IM in paediatrics. ⋯ In general Dutch YHC physicians have a relative positive attitude towards IP; more than half of the respondents used one or more forms of CAM and one third recommended CAM therapies. However, the majority of YHC physicians did not ask their clients about CAM use and seemed to have a lack of knowledge regarding CAM.
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Bmc Complem Altern M · Jan 2012
Randomized Controlled TrialEfficacy of acupuncture for chronic knee pain: protocol for a randomised controlled trial using a Zelen design.
Chronic knee pain is a common and disabling condition in people over 50 years of age, with knee joint osteoarthritis being a major cause. Acupuncture is a popular form of complementary and alternative medicine for treating pain and dysfunction associated with musculoskeletal conditions. This pragmatic Zelen-design randomised controlled trial is investigating the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of needle and laser acupuncture, administered by medical practitioners, in people with chronic knee pain. ⋯ The findings from this study will help determine whether laser and/or needle acupuncture is efficacious, and cost-effective, in the management of chronic knee pain in older people.
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Bmc Complem Altern M · Jan 2012
Randomized Controlled TrialPulsatile dry cupping in patients with osteoarthritis of the knee - a randomized controlled exploratory trial.
Cupping is used in various traditional medicine forms to relieve pain in musculoskeletal diseases. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of cupping in relieving the symptoms of knee osteoarthritis (OA). ⋯ In this exploratory study dry cupping with a pulsatile cupping device relieved symptoms of knee OA compared to no intervention. Further studies comparing cupping with active treatments are needed.
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Bmc Complem Altern M · Jan 2012
Randomized Controlled TrialEffect of electroacupuncture in postanesthetic shivering during regional anesthesia: a randomized controlled trial.
Shivering during regional anesthesia is a common complication and is related to a decrease in the patient's core body temperature. Previous studies have shown that acupuncture on specific acupoints can preserve core body temperature. The present study evaluated the effect of electroacupuncture in preventing the shivering caused by regional anesthesia. ⋯ The prophylactic use of electroacupuncture might maintain core body temperature, and may effectively prevent the shivering that commonly develops during regional anesthesia.
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Bmc Complem Altern M · Jan 2012
Computer-assisted lip diagnosis on Traditional Chinese Medicine using multi-class support vector machines.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the lip diagnosis is an important diagnostic method which has a long history and is applied widely. The lip color of a person is considered as a symptom to reflect the physical conditions of organs in the body. However, the traditional diagnostic approach is mainly based on observation by doctor's nude eyes, which is non-quantitative and subjective. The non-quantitative approach largely depends on the doctor's experience and influences accurate the diagnosis and treatment in TCM. Developing new quantification methods to identify the exact syndrome based on the lip diagnosis of TCM becomes urgent and important. In this paper, we design a computer-assisted classification model to provide an automatic and quantitative approach for the diagnosis of TCM based on the lip images. ⋯ A diagnostic system is proposed, which firstly segments the lip from the original facial image based on the Chan-Vese level set model and Otsu method, then extracts three kinds of features (color space features, Haralick co-occurrence features and Zernike moment features) on the lip image. Meanwhile, SVM-REF is adopted to select the optimal features. Finally, SVM is applied to classify the four classes. Besides, we also compare different feature selection algorithms and classifiers to verify our system. So the developed automatic and quantitative diagnosis system of TCM is effective to distinguish four lip image classes: Deep-red, Purple, Red and Pale. This study puts forward a new method and idea for the quantitative examination on lip diagnosis of TCM, as well as provides a template for objective diagnosis in TCM.