Data analysis
A primary analysis examining incremental cost utility from a societal perspective was performed to calculate the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) by comparing the differential mean costs and QALY between the pharmacopuncture and usual care groups. ICERs were calculated by dividing the difference in total costs by the difference in effects.Intention-to-treat (ITT) analysis was performed, and the missing values were imputed with multiple imputations (MI) using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method and predictive mean matching. Twenty imputed datasets were generated; the covariates for imputation were treatment allocation, gender, age, and other correlated variables. Correlated variables (≥ 0.4) were included in the imputation model. The missing values for EQ-5D and SF-6D were 2–3%. The mice package in R version 4.0.1 was used for the imputation of missing values.The significance level was set to 0.05 for all statistical analyses, and SAS 9.4 (© SAS Institute, Inc., Cary, NC, USA) and R studio 1.1.463 (© 2009–2018 RStudio, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, United States) were used for the statistical analyses.