Acupuncture
Case Reports
Clinical trials don’t make decisions.
Practitioners do.
How do you solve your toughest patient cases?
To find effective solutions for patients who are not responding to acupuncture treatment, further questions may arise:
- My treatment isn’t working. Am I missing the diagnosis?
- How do I know which style of acupuncture to choose? Could I have used better points?
- If it’s not working, how do I know when to shift gears and try something new?
- I’ve tried every approach that I know and nothing seems to work. What else can I do?
These are important questions, whose answers cannot be discovered through clinical trials. While clinical trials help us investigate problems with straightforward variables, actual patient care is more complex, and we have all seen patients where the clinical trial evidence does not deliver as promised. Essentially, all clinical questions are borne out of the central question in medicine: how do we find an effective solution for the individual patient sitting in front of us?
Case reports have for centuries been a central component of a practitioner’s education and continued learning. Where clinical trials fall short, answers to these practical questions can be examined in the context of a case report. Acupuncture case reports contain knowledge gained through experience. While learning acupuncture begins with listening to lectures, reading texts, and learning from mentors, the key to success is the wisdom to know when and how to use this knowledge in patient care.
Acupuncture Case Reports can describe important considerations in diagnosis, treatment, and case management that are unique to traditional practice. Reading them can offer insight into how to provide effective care. Writing case reports and documenting our experiences creates the evidence base necessary to support traditional practice and the overall effectiveness of acupuncture.
Acupuncture Case Reports
Frequently Asked Questions
Acupuncture case reports are a long-overlooked source of knowledge transmission. A case report is a piece of medical evidence, a description of a single patient. It includes information about the patient’s presentation, diagnosis, treatment, and outcomes, as well as a statement describing the significance of its conclusions.
A case study is an analysis of a particular example. Case studies are written in many different fields to advance knowledge, including law (legal case studies), economics (business case studies) and politics (historical case studies). Generally used in an educational context, case studies may sometimes be hypothetical, and while some of them are in written form, they may also be presented in spoken form.
A case report as medical evidence more specifically describes the care of a specific real patient, documented and analyzed for the purpose of benefitting clinical practice, education, and research.
Yes! For many patients including those with complex histories, or those not responding to typical care, the clinical trial evidence does not offer them any relief. Using a standardized clinical trial protocol to evaluate the effectiveness of an individualized modality like acupuncture does not accurately test real practice and may limit the success of acupuncture by eliminating its flexibility. Because traditional acupuncture is a patient-centered medicine, it requires patient-centered evidence.
How do I learn more about writing Case Reports?
Writing Acupuncture Case Reports: Theory and Practice, a guide for both students and clinicians, describes the theory and practice of writing case reports. This book includes practical advice for writing a case report and will provide you with the knowledge to:
- Recognize the role of case reports in Evidence Based Medicine
- Conduct a patient interview to obtain the information necessary for writing
- Realize the potential of writing case reports in integrative medicine
- Identify cases in your practice that may be useful to share as a written case report
- Carry out the steps to actually write a case report
- Understand the process of submitting a case for publication