williamaveryhudson

Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Integrative Medicine. What is it?

My best definition is World Music for Our Bodies.

The National Library of Medicine (publishers of PubMed) seems to be the one U.S. government agency that has escaped Bush-whacking. The past several years have seen an explosion of peer-reviewed journal articles about CAM. As a long-time worker in healthcare communications and beneficiary of western allopathic medicine, ayurveda and traditional chinese medicine, among others, I’ve followed these publications with great interest. Daily email alerts from the PubMed website often yield 50 articles a day.

Something important is happening. The Other 90% (which westerners call the developing world), and western practitioners outside of the mainstream, have much to offer the minority of us who rely and usually/sometimes benefit from the expensive miracles of western allopathic medicine. The medical journals seem to be listening. I’d like to help distribute the knowledge, leveraging the work of the U.S. National Library of Medicine and PubMed. Consider it a gift of the U.S. taxpayers in an otherwise dismal period of our brief history.

I’ll limit my reporting to articles that are freely available to anyone over the web. For the most part, I’ll extract from the abstracts/articles without comment. Just click on the PMID numbers to access the full text.

Let’s start with a paper from John Willinsky of the University of British Columbia and Mia Quint-Rapoport of the University of Toronto.

Willinsky J, Quint-Rapoport M. How complementary and alternative medicine practitioners use PubMed.
J Med Internet Res. 2007 Jun 29;9(2):e19. PMID: 17613489

The authors undertook a study to establish the potential contributions made by a range of PubMed tools and services to the use of the database by complementary and alternative medicine practitioners including chiropractors, registered massage therapists, and a homeopath. They found strong indications of PubMed’s potential value in the professional development of these complementary and alternative medicine practitioners in terms of engaging with and understanding research. It provides support for the various initiatives intended to increase access, including a recommendation that the National Library of Medicine tap into the published research that is being archived by authors in institutional archives and through other websites.

For new posts about free-access, peer-reviewed articles reviewing complementary medicine theory, practice and policy, visit my new blog CAMWATCH.

complementary medicine complementary and alternative medicine integrative medicine

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