Article history: The objective of this study w Received 20 December 2007 Received in revised form 26 August 2008 Accepted 29 August 2008

During the last five years a large number of randomised controlled clinical trials (RCTs) have been published on the efficacy of acupuncture in different conditions. In most of these studies verum is compared with sham acupuncture. In general both verum and sham have been found to be effective, and often with little reported difference in outcome. This has repeatedly led to the conclusion that ...

Background Studies by individual acupuncture practitioners have given an indication that offering acupuncture in primary care may reduce the need for referral to secondary care and reduce the costs of prescriptions. It would be informative to find out whether these findings can be supported by data from other practices. The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of surveying national dat...

High quality acupuncture clinical trials using single blind methods have been reported; however, the results of these single blind studies are controversial. Several investigators recently invented and validated a subject masking, single blind needle which to the subject looks and feels like a real needle. These recently designed placebo devices, which overcome the inadequacies of previous cont...

Article history: Received 29 July 2007 Received in revised form 30 December 2008 Accepted 13 May 2009

Article history: Received 1 December 2008 Received in revised form 29 January 2009 Accepted 4 February 2009 MSC: primary 54B10, 54D35 secondary 54A35

Article history: Received 16 December 2008 Received in revised form 8 April 2009 Accepted 29 April 2009 Available online 12 May 2009