Dear Editor:Registration of clinical trials can prevent bias and make their reporting transparent, thus also improving their quality. As an illustration, JAMA, New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet stipulate that researchers must register their clinical trials before they submit their articles. This is also supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and is written in the declaration of Helsinki. We propose that registration provides an opportunity for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to solve some of the current problems in TCM clinical studies.As the number of TCM studies has increased greatly in recent years, their quality has been the focus of researchers' attention, with the finding that there is a large gap between the quantity and quality of TCM clinical studies. In the evaluation of 1452 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of TCM, published between 1995 and 2005, it was reported that 103 (7.3%) had a correct randomization method and only 9 (0.6%) conformed to more than 50% of the items of the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT).1 Another report, based on searching the Chinese biomedical database and the Cochrane library, found that only 100 (3%) of 31,590 RCTs had appropriate randomizing, concealing, and blinding.2 Evidence-based medicine was introduced to TCM more than 20 years ago, and the quantity of systematic reviews has steadily increased. However, almost all systematic reviews conclude that there is insufficient evidence to draw conclusions and the studies are of poor quality. Similarly, in Chinese journals it has been found that international standards for methodological descriptions are not being met.3 Therefore, it is necessary when conducting RCTs for attention to be paid to improve the quality.
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