Dear Mom,
A few weeks ago, you asked me what I thought makes a successful forum topic/blog/post, and in my reply, I neglected probably the most important thing:
There has to be something interesting to say.
Sadly, the most interesting thing that I have realised lately is that don’t know enough about the scientific evidence for (1) global warming and (2) alternative medicine to have useful opinions on either.
I thought that I would try to do something about this, so I asked the person at the information desk of Foyles (in Oxford St) if they had any books on alternative medicine. He very patiently explained that they had many books on complementary medicine in the medical section. To which I said ‘Ah…’.
The book that I eventually bought was ‘Complementary and Alternative Medicine: An illustrated colour text’.
I would like to share two things that I learnt (apart from the bunches of facts about individual therapies):
(1) This is the definition given by the Cochrane Collaboration:
“Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a broad domain of healing resources that encompasses all health systems, modalities, and practices and their accompanying theories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period.”
(2) Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine is an open-access journal with peer-reviewed content encouraging rigorous research in this field.
I also happened across a review from the British Medical Journal that you might want to look up instead of reading the book:
ABC of complementary medicine
That’s all from me at the moment. Hopefully the weather this weekend will be good – am planning to go to Seaford agan for a nice walk along the cliffs.
Yours etc.
Bronwen
letter blog “alternative medicine” “complementary medicine”
Do I get a special prize for being the first idiot to enter their tags in a comment box?
The Royal Society put out a useful summary about climate change recently:
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/news.asp?id=6245
Sense about Science have done a bit of work on alternative medicine, with a factsheet on homeopathy and a promise of more to come.
http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/5/
Thank you for the web-site tips. I liked the box on interesting placebo facts, especially:
‘The colour of a placebo pill has a discernable effect: green and blue pills act as depressants; red pills act as stimulants… except in Italian men, for whom blue pills act as stimulants.’
Perhaps the blue ones remind them of “Blue diamonds”?
These comment tags are a bit strange, I agree.
Have you seen the excellent Nature Reports Climate Change blog? And the Nature Medicine blog Spoonful of Medicine?
So many blogs, so little time, as Mary Kate and Ashley may have it.
(I know about them via my young daughters, I have too little time for So Little Time.)