Arts or Science: Placebo Design in Trials of TCM

Call for Papers

The traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a major component of complementary and alternative medicine, which has been used in Asia, majorly in China, for a very long time. With the development of evidence-based medicine since the last century, TCM has been frequently scrutinized under this system, and more and more randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have been launched in recent years to evaluate the efficacy and/or safety of TCM, majorly, the Chinese herbal medicine or acupuncture. For this purpose, investigators should select a control group as a basis for comparing the intervention to determine whether it is superior, equal, or inferior to the control, depending on the objectives of their studies. Thus, the proper use and design of a control group is pivotal for evaluating the efficacy of an intervention in an RCT with TCM. In many RCTs of TCM, placebo has been used in the trial with herbal medicine or acupuncture (it is also called sham acupuncture) as a comparator. But it is still questionable how to design an ideal placebo for the trial.

Recently, some progress has been made in the clinical studies with different kinds of placebos as comparators. These studies will lead to evaluation of the efficacy and safety of TCM in an evidence-based approach. We believe it will be a hot topic in the coming years for the clinical research.

We invite investigators to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that focus on the placebo research on TCM or clinical research to improve the quality of trials. The information obtained from these studies shall be clearly evidence based. We are particularly interested in articles describing the placebo design in the trial of Chinese herbal medicine; sham acupuncture design in the clinical trials with acupuncture; placebo responder identification from the trial; systematic reviews on clinical studies about placebo design and placebo effects from the trial with TCM in certain of diseases; the clinical evaluation on placebo effects with TCM interventions. Potential topics include, but not limited to:

• Placebo design for the trial with Chinese herbal medicine
• Sham acupuncture design for the trial with acupuncture TCM
• Systematic review about the placebo effect in the trial with TCM
• Placebo responder related topic in the trial with TCM
• Mechanistic study about placebo effect in the trial with TCM
• Recent advances in placebo related clinical trial

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ecam/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/submit/journals/ecam/plac/ according to the following timetable:

Lead Guest Editor

• Zhaoxiang Bian, School of Chinese Medicine, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

Guest Editors

• Lixing Lao, Center for Integrative Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
• Hongcai Shang, Tinjiang University of TCM, Tinjiang, China
• Aiping Lu, Institute of Basic Research in Clinical Medicine, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Beijing, 100700, China
• William Cho, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Hong Kong
• Kiichiro Tsutani, Professor of Drug Policy and Management, Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan