A Review of Ovarian Cyst Management in Oriental Medicine

난소낭종에 대한 한의 임상 연구의 종설

Purpose: Ovarian cysts are fluid-filled sacs or pockets within or on the surface of an ovary. Most cysts present little or no discomfort and are noncancerous and harmless. So non-surgical treatments with herbal medicine or acupuncture and moxa therapy are important and suitable in this pathology. But there are few RCT articles about ovarian cyst in Korean Medicine(KM) clinical and research field. Methods: To review treatment method and other research tendency about ovarian cyst in journals related with KM and Traditional Chinese Medicine(TCM) through web-searching. Searching was done through web site #http://omis.ksucc.ac.kr# and pub-med(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) with key words #ovarian cyst#, #TCM#, #herb#, #CAM#, and #acupuncture#. Results: Seven articles were searched in journals related with KM, then six of them were simple case report and the other one was about diagnosis for ovarian cyst and another gynecologic disease such as uterine myoma and infertility through the iris diagnosis. And two articles were searched in journals related with TCM, then one of them was simple case report but the other is RCT article. Conclusion: KM and TCM therapies have some beneficial effect to resolve cyst, but objective power as a evidence is weak in the viewpoint of EBM. So continuous clinical trials such as RCT and multi center trials are needed.