Cupping Therapy for Knee Osteoarthritis: A Synthesis of Evidence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: This systematic review was aimed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of cupping therapy for treating patients with knee osteoarthritis (KOA). METHODS: The following databases were searched from their inception until June 2017: the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, PubMed, EMBASE, and 4 Chinese databases (Wan Fang Data, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), VeiPu, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI)). Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the effects of cupping therapy on KOA were included in this systematic review. A quantitative synthesis of the RCTs was conducted using RevMan 5.3 software. Study selection and data extraction and validation were performed independently by 2 reviewers. Cochrane criteria for risk of bias were used to assess the methodological quality of the trials. RESULTS: A total of 5 studies met our inclusion criteria. We analyzed the data from these 5 RCTs involving 535 participants. All included studies were judged to be at high risk for bias. Dry cupping therapy plus Western medicine therapy was more effective than Western therapy alone in reducing the pain scores (mean difference (MD) = -1.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) -2.40 to -1.18; p < 0.01). In addition, the study participants in the dry cupping therapy plus Western medicine therapy group showed significantly greater improvements in the pain (MD = -0.73, 95% CI -1.61 to -0.41; p < 0.01), stiffness (MD = -0.94, 95% CI -1.30 to -0.58; p < 0.01), and physical function (MD = -10.07, 95% CI -13.45 to -6.69; p < 0.01) domains of the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) compared to participants in the Western medicine therapy group. Moreover, when compared with Western medicine therapy alone, a meta-analysis of 4 RCTs suggested statistically significant favorable effects of wet cupping therapy plus Western medicine on the Lequesne Algofunctional Index (LAI) (MD = -3.44, 95% CI -4.21 to -2.68; p < 0.01). CONCLUSION: There is weak evidence to support the hypothesis that cupping therapy has beneficial effects on reducing the pain intensity and improving the physical function in patients with KOA.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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 it