A review of controlled trials of acupuncture for women's reproductive health care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Acupuncture as a therapy, and acupressure as self-treatment, are increasingly widely used for gynaecological conditions, and this study aims to review the scientific literature on their effectiveness. METHOD: A systematic review of controlled trials of acupuncture or acupressure for gynaecological conditions, published in a European language. SYNTHESIS: No studies in mastalgia, menorrhagia, pelvic pain, premenstrual syndrome or vulvodynia met the inclusion criteria. Four studies, two of which were patient-blinded, of acupuncture or acupressure for dysmenorrhoea suggest that it may have an effect. Three studies of acupuncture given at various stages of infertility treatment are promising, but none was patient-blind. Two studies of acupuncture for menopausal symptoms showed no effect during the treatment period when compared with sham acupuncture, and a third study showed no effect on hypertension in postmenopausal women, though some improvement in symptoms was noted. CONCLUSION: In view of the small number of studies and their variable quality, doubt remains about the effectiveness of acupuncture for gynaecological conditions. Acupuncture and acupressure appear promising for dysmenorrhoea, and acupuncture for infertility, and further studies are justified.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.055 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".