ACUPUNCTURE
ACUPUNCTURE? What does that have to do with big concepts like COLLABORATIVE, COLLECTIVE, and PRACADEMIC that I usually post to start a week?
Although I often post generically about growth and development principles a specific manifestation I work with is DynaMed Plus which has the mission to provide the most useful information to health care professionals at the point of care. Through COLLABORATIVE effort a tremendous COLLECTIVE value occurs providing the practicing clinician an instant view to the current synthesis of evidence and guidance to best inform decision-making during clinical practice. This is a huge effort with many people to systematically identify the evidence and guidance that matters, critically appraise what is trustworthy (which is more complicated than many realize), synthesize what may seem like discrepant information to get a comprehensive view of what we know and how well we know it, and summarize it to make this available in ways that others can use rapidly and easily.
We do this for tens of thousands of concepts (perhaps more, I know there are hundreds of thousands of citations but never tried to count the number of concepts). ACUPUNCTURE as a concept shows the PRACADEMIC value of putting this COLLECTIVE effort all together.
To catch you up on some background we recently started a series in European Journal of Integrative Medicine (EuJIM) where we consider an important article in integrative medicine, share our summary of the article or concept in DynaMed Plus, and comment on what this means for interpreting the evidence and what this means for clinical application. It was less than a month ago when I posted: INTEGRATIVE thinking: DynaMed Plus contributes new column to European Journal of INTEGRATIVE Medicine.
ACUPUNCTURE is one of the most common “alternativeâ€, “complementary†or “integrative†therapeutic modalities and pain (especially back pain) is one of the most common reasons it is used. Though much evidence has been published, the current clinical guidelines for back pain management are limited and outdated so there is rather little guidance for the use of acupuncture in the care of patients with one of the most common ailments.
The National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the United Kingdom made available a draft of their back pain guideline in development. They reported an extensive systematic review of acupuncture research and made a recommendation to not offer ACUPUNCTURE in clinical practice. This is a big development in the integrative medicine community and EuJIM asked us to comment on this issue. The result is now available in DynaMed Plus (with commented version published in EuJIM) and I will comment on different aspects of how this all came together over my subsequent posts this week.