Chinese Herbal Medicine with External Application for Cancer Pain: A Systematic Review

Objective: To conduct a systematic review of the Chinese herbal medicine with external application for cancer pain.Methods: A systematic search with reference tracing was conducted that uses Chinese herbal medicine,cancer pain,external application as the keywords,in databases of Pubmed database,Cochrane Library,MEDLINE,EMBASE,CBM database,Wanfang database,VIP database and CNKI database in Chinese and in English from 1 /1991 to 10 /2013 to determine possible eligible articles.We screened external use Chinese herbal medicine for cancer pain randomized controlled trials,then performed systematic reviews according to the Cochrane Handbook provides quality assessment of the literature. Results: Nine RCTs were included and they all missed the allocation concealment and follow- up reports. Because of the shortcomings blinding,small sample size,unknown specific medicine prescription coverage,missing medicine quality control,the low clinical relevance,all the trials were evaluated as high risk of bias. Conclusion: Due to the insufficient evidence based medicine of Chinese herbal medicine with external application for cancer pain,there is need for strict designed and high quality RCTs.