Objective:
Try to find the way to analyze and arrange the useful information from acupuncture ancient literatures by using the idea of evidence based medicine, and then put it into clinical practice.
Methods:
(1) The clinical therapeutic effect oriented information from acupuncture ancient literatures should be analyzed and arranged by the help of data mining technology.
(2) As a medical system with distinguishing feature, acupuncture combines theory with practice and experience into the harmonious integration. So the validity and efficacy of clinical therapeutic effect of collected information should be further discussed and judged by clinical experts home and abroad, and the information is supposed to be divided into three parts: the consensus, the controversy and the discard.
(3) Efforts should be made to popularize the consensus, and the discard can be stored and displayed for its validity in history. As for the controversy, more multicenter, large-sample, well-designed clinical trials should be done to select the effective methods from the available ones.
Results:
According to above methods, taking migraine for example, the information that usage of Shao Yang meridian is 58. 1% and the usage of Acupuncture Single Point Fengchi, Shuaigu (GB8), Waiguan (TE5) is 32. 2% is mining from acupuncture ancient literatures, which is also accepted by clinical experts as the consensus part.
Conclusion:
Evidence based medicine focuses on clinical therapeutic effect, regards assessment approach as its guideline. With the help of it, considering the specialty of acupuncture, mining and arranging the beneficial information from ancient acupuncture literatures is feasible.