History and Development of TCM Case Report in a Real-World Setting

Table 6

The characteristics of guidelines of TCM case reports.

Title	Theme	Author	Time	Journal	Characteristics
Writing case reports—author guidelines for acupuncture in medicine	Acupuncture	Adrian White	2004	Acupuncture in Medicine	It was a developing guideline for helping authors to write thorough but succinct case reports in a structured manner. The format of acupuncture case report in this guideline includes an abstract, description of the case, literature search, discussion, and summary or conclusions. A patient consent is required before publication.
Towards improving the reporting quality of clinical case reports in complementary medicine: Assessing and illustrating the need for guideline development	Conventional and complementary medicine	R. A. van Haselen	2015	Complementary therapies in medicine	It was presented as a conceptual framework for developing clinical case reporting guidelines for CAM treatments to integrate general guideline with specific quality items of CAM therapy, which practically implemented the development of a reporting guideline for case report in homoeopathy. It will be more clarity in reporting CAM cases because the specific quality items of CAM treatment are determined by the specific characteristics of the clinical case report and the corresponding specific objectives of CAM discipline.
Consensus-based recommendations for case report in Chinese medicine (CARC)	Chinese medicine	FU Shufei	2016	Chinese Journal of integrative medicine	The CARC group established systematic recommendations by reviewing the general reporting quality of case reports. They have an important effect on promoting the development of TCM as it retained the principles of scientific, diversity, and practicability and satisfied the needs of standardization.
Writing a case report an introductory guide for practitioners of herbal medicine	Herbal medicine	Richard Adams	2016	Journal of herbal medicine	It was developed as an introductory guide for practitioners to write a case report about herbal medicine. It suggested a trick that herbal medicine’ activity can only be explained in general terms with references of previous clinical observations partly because of inadequacy understanding of many biomedical mechanisms.

TCM: traditional Chinese medicine; CAM: complementary and alternative medicine.