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Background Bone fractures are important clinical events for both patients and professionals. Active treatment options are limited for delayed unions and for nonunions; surgery is common but not entirely risk-free. This report describes three cases of delayed union successfully treated with herbal decoction. Participants Three patients had trapezoid and 3rd metacarpal bone fractures, 2nd, and 5th metatarsal bone fractures, respectively. All three patients were diagnosed with delayed union by an independent orthopedic surgeon based on computed tomography (CT) scan/radiographic imaging and fracture duration without a healing process. Patients took herbal decoction, Jeopgol-tang, with individually added herbs based on symptom manifestations, twice daily for 56, 85 and 91 days with no additional interventions except for a splint that they had been wearing since fracture diagnosis. Outcomes Improvement of delayed union was evaluated using radiographic imaging or CT during treatment with Jeopgol-tang. Results After taking herbal medicine, callus and bony bridging were confirmed on follow-up imagings and the patients described their experience with pain reduction at an interview after recovery. Conclusions This case series suggests that the herbal decoction Jeopgol-tang warrants further investigation to establish its role as a complementary and integrative medicine treatment option for delayed unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herbal prescriptions are frequently sought as complementary medicine treatment for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). However, variability in pattern identification of Traditional Medicine has been criticised. Using patient data on clinical remission, we aimed to develop pattern identification (PI) algorithms refined by identified pattern and key symptoms which practitioners can easily differentiate. Symptoms of IBD patients with remission were divided into Large intestine, Water-dampness, Respiratory, Upper gastrointestinal (GI) tract, and Coldness patterns. Using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) method, symptoms described as indications of the herbal prescriptions and 5 patterns were matched. Decision tree modeling was used for prediction of relevant patterns from symptoms. Five-fold cross validation and sensitivity analysis was conducted to validate the model. Incomplete feeling of bowel emptying for Large intestine pattern, water dampness for Water-dampness pattern, chronic rhinitis for Respiratory pattern, gastric stuffiness for Upper GI tract pattern, and abdominal pain for Coldness pattern were selected by TF-IDF analysis. Overall accuracy of the decision tree was 64.4 %. In the treatment algorithm by the decision tree modeling, associations emerged between presence of incomplete feeling of bowel emptying and Large intestine type (100 %), chronic rhinitis and Respiratory type (100 %), water dampness symptoms and Water-dampness type (78.4 %), and gastric stuffiness and Upper GI tract type (58.3 %). The PI algorithm we suggest can help clinicians determine patterns of IBD. Future studies with a large sample could yield an improved algorithm that predicts not only patterns but also corresponding herbal medicine prescriptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]