How objective are systematic reviews? Differences between reviews on complementary medicine

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Systematic reviews are considered the most reliable tool to summarize existing evidence. To determine whether reviews that address the same questions can produce different answers we examined systematic reviews of herbal medicine, homeopathy, and acupuncture taken from a previously established database. Information on literature searching, inclusion criteria, selection process, quality assessment, data extraction, methods to summarize primary studies, number of included studies, results and conclusions was compared qualitatively.