Medicines, Volume 2, Issue 1 (March 2015) – 3 articles , Pages 1-46

Tajikistan is a small country located in Central Asia. The mostly mountainous terrain with a continental, subtropical, and semiarid climate, is characterized by diverse flora. Many people in Tajikistan rely on medicinal plants as their traditional form of medicine to prevent and cure health disorders. Aromatic medicinal plants, in particular, have played an important role for the local people. In this review, we present a summary of the uses of 18 aromatic medicinal plants from Tajikistan and their compositions of secondary metabolites. Full article

Background: Whether acupuncture treatment employing multiple penetrating, skin-touch placebo, or no-touch placebo needles designed for double blinding actually do blind practitioners and patients has not been investigated. We aimed to investigate this question. Subjects: 120 patients with functional neck/shoulder stiffness but in otherwise healthy condition were randomly assigned to a treatment using four penetrating, four skin-touch placebo, or four no-touch placebo needles. Each of six acupuncturists applied four needles to four acupoints in the neck/shoulder of 20 patients. Acupuncturists and patients were asked to guess the treatment mode and their confidence in their guesses on 100 mm visual analog scales. Results: The kappa coefficients between practitioner guesses and treatment type and between patient guesses and treatment type were 0.15 and 0.44, respectively. The median score of practitioner confidence was 46.8, and no significant difference in confidence between correct and incorrect guesses was revealed for any treatment. The median score of patient confidence for correct guesses was 77.6. The kappa coefficient between practitioner and patient guesses was 0.06. Conclusions: The practitioners were blinded to the nature of treatment using the same multiple needles, but patient blinding was insufficient. Further improvement is necessary to achieve satisfactory patient blinding with these acupuncture needles. Full article