BACKGROUND Chronic neck pain is a major public health burden with only limited evidence for the effectiveness of complementary therapies. This study aimed to test the efficacy of cupping massage in patients with neck pain. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with chronic non-specific neck pain were randomly assigned to cupping massage or a wait list control. The intervention group received 5 cuppin...

Introduction. Cupping has been used since antiquity in the treatment of pain conditions. In this pilot study, we investigated the effect of traditional cupping therapy on chronic nonspecific neck pain (CNP) and mechanical sensory thresholds. Methods. Fifty CNP patients were randomly assigned to treatment (TG, n = 25) or waiting list control group (WL, n = 25). TG received a single cupping treat...

BACKGROUND Continuous low back pain is associated with the symptoms of the pregnancy period. In spite of the improvement of low back pain within 6 months after the delivery, some women may develop chronic problems. This study aimed to investigate the effect of dry cupping therapy at BL23 point on the intensity of low back pain in primiparous women.  METHODS In the present randomized clinical ...

BACKGROUND Conducting randomized controlled trials on traditional Chinese non-drug therapies has been limited by factors such as patient preference to specific treatment modality. The aim of this study is to investigate the feasibility of applying a partially randomized patient preference (PRPP) trial model in evaluating the efficacy of two types of traditional Chinese medicine therapies, acupu...

We propose an empirical cupping correction (ECC) algorithm to correct for CT cupping artifacts that are induced by nonlinearities in the projection data. The method is raw data based, empirical, and requires neither knowledge of the x-ray spectrum nor of the attenuation coefficients. It aims at linearizing the attenuation data using a precorrection function of polynomial form. The coefficients ...

BACKGROUND As a common disease in pediatrics, constipation poses a high burden to the community. In this study, we aimed to investigate the efficacy of dry cupping therapy (an Eastern traditional manipulative therapy) in children with functional constipation. MATERIALS AND METHODS One hundred and twenty children (4-18 years old) diagnosed as functional constipation according to ROME III crite...

A 51-year-old woman had optic disk cupping from optic nerve compression by an intracranial aneurysm. Slit-lamp stereoscopic examination of the living eye immediately post mortem revealed an optic cup vertically oral, elongated superiorly, and indistinguishable from disk changes seen early in glaucoma. The histopathological changes differed from those in glaucoma by showing no glial atrophy. Ins...

In the flat panel detector-based cone beam CT system, the scatter photons which reach the flat panel detector increase the detected signal, produce the image cupping artifact and reduce the image contrast. To conquer the X-Ray scatter problem, this study proposes the beam attenuation grid -based scatter correction algorithm that needs to add a beam attenuation grid (BAG) between the X-Ray sourc...

Since the introduction of the original singlesection computed tomography (CT) machines, and more recent spiral CT, several different types of CT artefact have been described. Recognized artefacts include motion artefact, metallic streak artefact, beam hardening, partial volume artefact and step artefact. The use of contrast-enhanced spiral CT has created many new artefacts and potential pitfall...