2016, Vol.6, No.3

CELLMED 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.03

pISSN : 3022-6805 / eISSN : 3022-6791
https://journal.kci.go.kr/cellmed

Evidence based practice (EBP) is a system of applying the most current and valid high quality evidence to support clinical decision making in a healthcare setting. In the twenty five years since its inception, EBP has become the accepted benchmark for excellence in healthcare. Although the system emerged within the biomedical sciences, in the years since EBP has become normative across all healthcare modalities from dentistry, allied health to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Practicing evidence based medicine within any modality potentially offers the patient the best available care based on high quality evidence. Yet it is the nature of the evidence that provokes some questions about the suitability of EBP across all modalities of healthcare. The meta analysis of randomized controlled trial (RCT) stands at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of evidence in EBP. This forms a challenge to CAM due to the difficulty in reducing the elementals of a holistic naturopathic assessment of a patient into an answerable question to be tested within a RCT. On one level this makes EBP paradigmatically incompatible with CAM, yet on another level it presents the opportunity to redefine the parameters of what is considered high level evidence. EBP has become a tool, and at times a weapon wielded by governments and health insurance companies to direct healthcare funding and policy. The implications of the nature of accepted evidence are becoming far reaching. The pursuit of the best available healthcare for each individual is the focus of EBP. However, the injudicious use of this system to direct health policy is fraught with biomedical bias and dominance. This issue raises the challenge to CAM to present high level evidence according to the rules of evidence, or face the annihilation of centuries of empirical knowledge.

Thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) is a novel interleukin (IL)-7-like cytokine and was originally discovered in the supernatant of a murine thymic stromal cell line. TSLP signal initiates via complex of the TSLP receptor and the IL-7 receptor α chain. TSLP expression is closely connected with many diseases such as atopic dermatitis, allergic rhinitis, asthma, inflammatory arthritis, eosinophilic esophagitis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel diseases, and cancer. In this review, I discussed biological roles of TSLP on mast cell-mediated allergic responses. In addition, this review summarizes the effective drugs in allergic-inflammatory reactions induced by TSLP on mast cells.

Pansori is a unique genre of Korean art music. Sugungga is a form of Pansori that is so famous as to be included in the representative five texts of Pansori, and is also a fable about a Dragon King who lived in a palace on the water. The Dragon King had a disease and the major plot of the story is the finding of a cure for his illness. At the beginning of Sugungga, Yaksungga appears on the scene in the form of an ascetic who has knowledge of various herbal medicines. By reciting and singing this medical knowledge, Yaksungga functions as an effective mnemonic technique to aid memorization of the herbs and their properties. Yaksungga exists only in Korea, and functions in Sugungga not only as a dramatic factor in the play, but also as a tool that allows people to easily learn professional medical knowledge during those times, not by books, but by funny rhymes, which gave people the opportunities to apply such knowledge in useful ways.