Acupuncture for Cancer

Acupuncture for Cancer

Efferth, et al wrote, among the different facets of CAM, acupuncture and herbal medicine raised special interest not only for treatment of patients but also for research of medicine. As can be seen in Figure 1, acupuncture and herbal medicines have become thriving fields of research during the past half century. A comprehensive survey of published papers from 1960 to 2013 shows the number of annually published papers dealing with acupuncture or herbal medicines for all medical fields (Figure 1(a)) and in the context of cancer treatment (Figure 1(b)). Since a tremendous interest in acupuncture and herbal medicine was observed in 2000, the increasing numbers of published papers per year are apparent. In 2013, more than 90 papers on acupuncture and more than 450 papers on herbal medicines appeared in the area of cancer prevention and therapy. The increase rate of published papers concerning cancer over the years indicates that this small research field took a booming development. These facts and figures illustrate that the present special issue focuses on a hot topic in cancer research.

Source:

Thomas Efferth, Sookyung Lee, Yoshiharu Motoo, and Sven Schröder. Acupuncture and Herbal Medicine for Cancer Patients. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Volume 2014 (2014), Article ID 326179, 2 pages