Quality assessment of reporting of randomization, allocation concealment, and blinding in traditional Chinese medicine RCTs: a review of 3159 RCTs identified from 260 systematic reviews.

Background Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which are of poor quality tend to exaggerate the effect estimate and lead to wrong or misleading conclusions. The aim of this study is to assess the quality of randomization methods, allocation concealment and blinding within traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) RCTs, discuss issues identified for current TCM RCTs, and provide suggestions for quality improvement.