The Japanese Society of Hospital Pharmacists (JSHP) started to collect the pharmaceutical care reports from the hospital pharmacists by a name of “PreAVOID” from 1999. The report number of PreAVOID increased year by year and reached about 50,000 totals in 2006. PreAVOID reports are classified in 2. One is the prevention of the adverse reaction and the drug interaction, the other is the avoidance of progress to the adverse reaction. In the latter, the role of the adverse reaction monitoring is included. Therefore PreAVOID is able to apply in Pharmacovigilance. PreAVOID is reported to JSHP by Fax or E-mail or the homepage of JSHP and it is evaluated and classified and then are accumulated in the database. The accumulated PreAVOID reports are utilized for creation of the pharmaceutical care information, study promotion about the medical economy. Therefore PreAVOID takes an important role as a nucleus of the pharmaceutical care management system by the pharmacists.
We are convinced that PreAVOID will be able to contribute to achievement of real purpose of Pharmacovigilance that is the effective and safety drug therapy.

　　The “Akita Heart-full Net” started operation as a cooperative community medical network in April 2014. It was established jointly by Akita Prefecture and Akita Medical Association and is run by the latter. Problems experienced in its operation have been addressed, and a duplex system was introduced so that many medical institutions can now easily join the system. Functions in relation to participating clinics especially have been enhanced. The new functions, “unloader” and “portal window”, were included so that clinics can used the system whether or not they the use electronic health records or standardized data. A seamless system that does not distinguish between flagship hospitals and clinics enables information exchange and sharing. This will further enable a cooperative system for clinical practice to be established based on free access to information about referred patients and the use of the community medical care cooperation pass. To contribute further to medical care in Akita Prefecture, we plan to extend the system further so that it functions as a collaborative network, covering a wide area and involving different professionals, with a focus on home medical care within the context of integrated community care.

In the present paper, the author reviews acupuncture clinical practice and the research scene in Western countries, and discusses problems in Japanese acupuncture.
The use of acupuncture is increasing in the West, but many more people have received this treatment in Japan. Although regulations on acupuncture depend on the country, many EU countries limit acupuncture practice to medical doctors. Regarding the style and theory of acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine is overwhelmingly dominant in the world.
In recent years, the worldwide prevalence of the concept of evidence-based medicine (EBM) has facilitated randomized controlled trials on acupuncture in the West. However, there is a bigproblem in setting a sham acupuncture group. Pragmatic clinical trials should be considered more in the future.
If the researchers of “Japanese acupuncture” pursue only reductionistic research methodology, they might lose something important that traditional medicine has brought for many years. Although we should employ the concept of EBM, we, at the same time, should discuss what Japanese acupuncture is and how we evaluate the aspect of the “art” of acupuncture medicine more intensely.

A double-blind controlled test was performed to determine the analgesic effect of semiconductor laser irradiation (30mW, Ga-Al-As semiconductor laser) on various types of low back pain.
In the laser irradiated group, the improvement rate (including extremely effective and effective cases) of spontaneous pain was 61%, tenderness 61.8%, and locomotion pain 64% with an overall improvement rate of 73.5%. Significant differences from the control group were thus found in all types of pain (P<0.01).
No significant difference was found in the Lasegue sign and Deep Tendon Reflex (DTR) between the laser irradiated group and the control group and no organic change was found in the laser irradiated tissues.
Also, no significant difference was found between the laser irradiated group and control group blood test items with no side effect or degenerative changes. This confirmed that the laser irradiation was harmless to human tissues. The effectiveness and safety of the semiconductor low energy laser have been established. The authors therefore believe that the laser irradiation will be quite useful in treating low back pain in the future.