The randomized controlled trial (RCT) as applied to medicine started in the mid last century (1) and is now deemed as the most rigorous scientific method for evaluating the clinical effectiveness of medical interventions.The earliest RCTs in Chinese medicine (CM) appeared in the early 1980s (2).In the past 30years,RCT was seen to have gradually infiltrated into and have been accepted reluctantly by CM.At the beginning,many held that RCT principles and methods were not suitable for evaluating CM therapies.