Investigating the Reliability of Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis

There have been few studies that evaluate the reliability of the clinical use of pulse diagnosis despite it being a fundamental part of Oriental medicine diagnostics. The objective of this study was to determine the levels of intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of practitioners using an operationally defined method, Contemporary Chinese Pulse Diagnosis (CCPD), to evaluate the radial pulse of volunteer subjects. The study utilised a real-life design to investigate CCPD in a clinical setting. Fifteen volunteer subjects and six testers skilled in the CCPD method were recruited. Two episodes of data collection were conducted 28 days apart as a practical test and retest. For each subject, 30 pulse categories defined by the CCPD system were assessed and reassessed by the same four testers during both phases of testin