J Altern Complement Med. 2000 Jun; 6(3): 257-64.

Subjective scales for the evaluation of therapeutic effects and their use in complementary medicine.

Liverani A, Minelli E, Ricciuti A.

Istituto di Igiene e Medicina Preventiva, FacoltÃ di Medicina e Chirurgia dell'UniversitÃ di Milano, Milan, Italy. liverani@dsi.unimi.it

Using existing systems for appraising the efficacy of various therapies, regardless of their typology, the authors considered approximately 10 methods commonly used to evaluate quality of life. They provide guidelines on how to build another index for judging quality of life, taking into account the patient's conditions of life. These indexes share similar problems in finding objective measures for assessing personal situations without regard to patients' or observers' subjective impressions. Nevertheless, the authors demonstrate that for randomized controlled clinical trials and for meta-analyses this deficiency is also a problem, at least qualitatively, for scientific methods that are considered quite objective. Therefore, according to the methodological manifesto of the World Health Organization, the authors conclude by suggesting the simultaneous adoption, for complementary medicine studies, of some methods already known for their use in conventional medicine, despite general limited validity.