Yonsei Medical Journal

The acupuncture study by Kang et al. raises several concerns.1 The authors define their study as a case-control study, however it does not fit the criteria of a case-control study because it is not retrospective. Its design is a non-randomized, con-trolled clinical study, and thus cannot fully ad-dress the authors ' aim of “determining the effect of smoking cessation using acupuncture.” Regarding the group allocation, there is no mention of informed consent or the information the students were given before they participated in the trial. The authors should have clarified whether the students were aware of which in-tervention they would receive, and that one acu-puncture treatment was specific and the other wa