How to Write a Publishable Acupuncture Case Report Using Medi-Chi

The case report builder sits inside the practitioner patient records, so it is part of the practitioner tooling rather than the free reference lookups. Herbs and acupuncture point references stay freely viewable; the clinical workflow tools, including case reports and PDF exports, are practitioner features.

No. STRICTA was developed as an extension to CONSORT for reporting acupuncture interventions in clinical trials, not for case reports. Its intervention items — points, needle type and depth, response sought, number and frequency of sessions, practitioner background — are still the clearest description of how to report needling detail, so they are useful as a scaffold inside a case report. The directly relevant case report guidance is CARE plus the CARE extension for acupuncture case reports.

Start with CARE as the base checklist, then add the CARE extension for acupuncture case reports if the case is an acupuncture case. For cases framed in Chinese medicine terms, CARC (Consensus-based Recommendations for Case Report in Chinese Medicine) covers pattern differentiation and traditional diagnostic reporting. For herbal cases, check the current status of CHM-CARE on the EQUATOR Network. Requirements vary between journals, so read the instructions to authors for your target journal before choosing.

CARE scores your report against the CARE checklist plus acupuncture intervention items. Integrative (Medi-Chi) is a house reporting mode that adds practitioner credentials, treatment setting, concomitant conventional care, herbal product identification with botanical name and dose, herb-drug interaction screening, integrative rationale, ethics approval, and funding and conflicts. It is not a published external guideline and it is not produced, reviewed or endorsed by the NICM Health Research Institute at Western Sydney University, so do not present it to a journal as an external standard.

No. Reporting guidelines support the completeness and transparency of what you have written. They do not assess scientific quality and they do not predict publication. A high score means the reporting is thorough; whether the case is worth publishing is a separate judgement made by editors and reviewers.

No. The checker is advisory only. It shows a completeness percentage, lists missing or thin items with fix hints, and flags how many required items are outstanding, but every export button stays available. Internal audit reports and teaching drafts legitimately skip sections.

The .docx export is a formatted Word manuscript suitable for journals that ask for Word files. The submission pack goes further and zips the manuscript in .docx and .md alongside a cover letter, the completeness report, a de-identification and consent statement and a README. You still need to add journal-specific detail to the cover letter and confirm patient consent before sending.

A de-identify toggle is on by default and replaces the patient name with a non-identifying label across every export. The submission pack includes a de-identification statement listing the remaining checks — dates reduced to intervals, geography no more specific than region, occupation generalised, images cleared — so you review them deliberately. If de-identification was off or consent was not recorded at export time, the cover letter says so explicitly.