Effect of Laser Moxibustion for Knee Osteoarthritis: A Multisite, Double-blind Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective. To examine the effects of laser moxibustion on pain and function in patients with knee osteoarthritis (OA). Methods. A double-blind randomized clinical trial (4-week treatment, 20-week follow-up) was conducted. A total of 392 symptomatic knee OA patients with moderate to severe clinically significant knee pain were randomly assigned to laser treatment or sham laser control group (1:1). Twelve sessions of laser moxibustion or sham laser treatments on the acupuncture points at the affected knee(s) were performed 3 times a week for 4 weeks. The primary outcome measurement was change in Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) pain score from baseline to Week 4. Results. Among the 392 randomized participants, 364 (92.86%) completed the trial. The median WOMAC pain score decreased significantly at Week 4 in the active group than in the sham group (2.1, 95% CI 1.6–2.6, P < 0.01). At Week 24, compared to the sham laser, active laser treatment resulted in significant pain reduction and function improvement (3.0, 95% CI 2.5–3.6, P < 0.01, and 14.8, 95% CI 11.9–17.6, P < 0.01, respectively). The physical component of the quality of life significantly improved in the active group vs the sham controls at Week 4 (3.2, 95% CI 1.3–5.0, P = 0.001) up to Week 24 (5.1, 95% CI 3.3–7.0, P < 0.001). No serious adverse effects were reported. Conclusion. Laser moxibustion resulted in statistically and clinically significant pain reduction and function improvement following a 4-week treatment in patients with knee OA.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Randomized trial | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Randomized trial | high |
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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
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".