The worldwide clinical implementation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is increasing as complementary therapy to Western Medicine. This development leads to an increasing demand to evaluate not only the scientific proof of efficacy, but also to measure the quality of life (QOL) concepts specific to TCM.
This article attempts to 1) review the relevant published literature (indexed in Medline) on the evaluation of QOL in patients treated with TCM, 2) compare QOL of patients treated with Western Medicine and TCM and 3) describe the limitations of the literature and future research directions.
Overall, the approach of TCM as a model of system biology appears to improve QOL and may be worth integrated into conventional Western Medicine.