Talk:Alternative medicine

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[edit] Electromagnetic Therapy

Hi. I've started the article Electromagnetic Therapy. I will be placing a link in this article on Thursday September 21st 2006 and would appreciate your feedback and opinion prior to commencing this action. I believe this should be in the "see also" section, nevertheless you may want to add a seperate section all by itself. Please forward your comments no later then Thursday 15h00 EST. Thank you. --CyclePat 16:09, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

It depends what the link is for. I've made some comments on the talk page. --apers0n 18:17, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Complementary and Alternative Medicine

I just spotted a new page Complementary and Alternative Medicine I guess it should be merged here or redirected. --Salix alba (talk) 23:05, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

It got done on Nov. 16. -- Fyslee 01:55, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Link removed - could someone check if it should be used or not?

This link was removed from the article by user Steth, with the justification "Rmv private link seeking donations of highly marginalizing, editorialized, subjective opinion "articles" by ex-psychiatrist not trained in any of the fields criticized". A brief overview on the page, however, shows that for example the Acupuncture article has plentiful references to well-renowned journals. It's tough for me to judge if the information is biased or lacking in any of the respects that Steth mentioned, though. Could anyone check, and re-add the link if justifiable? Narssarssuaq 16:51, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

The link above doesn't work. I was referring to this website. It looks rather scientific, and they're used in refs 30 and 34. Could someone investigate if we may use them as a source or not? To me it seems OK. Narssarssuaq 14:20, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
The link was immediately restored after it was deleted. It was a strictly POV deletion since it doesn't violate WP:EL. -- Fyslee 14:32, 3 December 2006 (UTC)
Great, that's finally settled then. There seems to be anti-scientific POV involved sometimes. That kind of attitude undermines the whole idea of Wikipedia in my opinion. For instance, Magnet therapy has recently been totally rewritten by someone with a poor knowledge of science. Narssarssuaq 14:41, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Alternative" definition of alternative medicine - why?

Despite being bold in trying to make this page more accessable, my edit was reverted. Apparently, I have to achieve consensus before I can alter the page. Well, here's my point:

  1. The intro states that there are proponents of evidence-based medicine who don't distinguish between conventional and alternative medicine.
  2. There is then a rambling section called "Alternative definition" which is centered around Richard Dawkin's quote on alternative medicine, and is substantively the same as what the "proponents of evidence-based medicine" say.

I don't believe we need this "alternative definition" section, as it simply repeats what the lead section has to say. Furthermore, as there are plenty of medical doctors to reference for this position, we don't need a populist non-medical doctor such as Dawkins. Finally, I think such a contentious criticism of alternative medicine should be taken out of the lead section altogether.

So, may I put my edit back?

62.31.67.29 13:06, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A redirect is not a merge

You have removed a merge tag [1], deleted a whole article (without merging the contents here), and left only a redirect. Being bold is one thing, but what you have done can be considered vandalism. Be very careful. Significant edits or large edits, especially deletions, should be discussed first. Please undo what you have done´. -- Fyslee 13:19, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

I reviewed every statement in the article under consideration and came to the conclusion that nothing was worth including - either because it was already in this article, or because the material did not meet Wikipedia's WP:NPOV, WP:V and/or WP:NOR policies. For your edification, here is my reasoning:
The term is very debated within the scientific arena, since it has been mainly used in public health discourse (mostly among physicians and sociologists) only in US and UK during the last decades.
Other continental European scientific communities -- with even a much longer history in traditional medicine or herbal medicine (such us Germany or France)-- do not know this term, neither do they use it.
I agree that "alternative medicine", "complementary medicine" and CAM are recent neologisms to describe a wide range of techniques, many of which are several centuries old and come from around the world. A reference to a dictionary which has tried to find the earliest printed reference would be a good thing. However, the above text is not acceptable for providing such a history section. It doesn't give verifiable facts, nor references. It's just a rant. I've tried to find references to the first usages of the terms, but I've come up blank. I will check with an OED subscriber later today. But until someone can find a verifiable source of the history of the terms, it's not a good idea to put it into the article.
The National Institute of Health in the US defines "Complemntary and Alternative Medicine" (CAM) as "a group of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not presently considered to be part of conventional medicine".
Already in the article. It's also wrongly attributed - the NIH themselves don't define CAM like that, their NCCAM division do.
The main problem that most scientists have with this terminology is that the CAM definition is not sufficiently culturally senstive, since what is "alternative" and/or "complementary" towards a pre-existing medical tradition/school can be very different in different cultures of the world. Paradoxically, industrial "pharmaceuticals" could also be seen as CAMs within the context of traditional medicine/traditional healers in Africa or even among Traditional Chinese Medicine.
"Most scientists" is an unattributed claim, or "some argue" by any other name. This paragraph is simply an attack on the definition, not grounded in verifiable references. It reads to me like original research.
Moreover, the list of what is considered to be CAM can change continually, as those therapies that are proven to be safe and effective become adopted into conventional health care and as new approaches to health care emerge.
Already in the article.
According to the NIH (National Institutes of Health): 1. complementary medicine is used together with conventional medicine. An example of a complementary therapy is using aromatherapy to help lessen a patient's discomfort following surgery; 2. alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. An example of an alternative therapy is using a special diet to treat cancer instead of undergoing surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy that has been recommended by a conventional doctor. A less extreme example would be choosing an echinacea medicine from a naturopath, for hayfever, rather than an NSAID pharmaceutical or conventional doctor recommendation/prescription.
Not already in the article, but I don't think it needs to be. We could certainly recycle the reference to NCCAM's definition (already in the article) as a citation for our introductory sentences.
NCCAM classifies CAM therapies into five categories, or domains:
It does, and that's what the prominent "NCCAM classifications" link and list in the introductory boxout shows. I don't like the "Terms and concepts" article, as it's not really in the Wikipedia style, but fixing that is a job for another day - unless you'd like to do it. I propose a "NCCAM classifications of alternative medicines" article, with the five classifications and lists of what CAM techniques fall under that. Nethertheless, I don't think the NCCAM classications need to be brought into this article any more than the boxout already provides.
CAM is often erroneously confused in Western countries with traditional medicine.
This is another unattributed claim. I also think it's incorrect. CAM is an umbrella term for anything outside Western medical orthodoxy (or rather, anything which doesn't currently have proven efficacy). "Traditional medicine" is more vaguely defined than CAM. Traditional medicine overlaps with CAM, in that some traditional medicines (by which I'm defining as "invented before the 20th century") are still used today, marketed as CAM because of unproven efficacy - such as acupuncture, herbal remedies - and some traditional medicines are not still used today - such as bloodletting. There are also traditional medicines that are part of medical orthodoxy. Draw yourself a Venn diagram as an exercise. So there is a subset of traditional medicine that is CAM, not an "erroneous confusion".
So, in my opinion, everything of worth has been merged from the article. 62.31.67.29 10:58, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
Thank you for the excellent explanation. I agree. -- Fyslee 08:19, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Osteopathic medicine?

Osteopathic medicine, in my opinion, does not belong on this page. OM is actually referred to as not an alternative medicine, but an "evidence based medicine" according to the osteopathic medicine page itself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.61.200.253 (talk • contribs) 01:29, 3 December 2006 (UTC).

There is a difference, and here's what the disambiguation page says:Osteopathy may refer to:
* Osteopathy: alternative medicine, as practiced by osteopaths outside the United States
* Osteopathic medicine: as applied by osteopathic physicians in the United States
The European version is not a medical profession on a par with MDs, and is very much alternative, with many different pseudoscientific practices. They have never officially distanced themselves from A.T. Still's weird ideas, while the American osteopaths have done so a long time ago. (Unfortunately there are still American DOs who are no different than European DOs. Joseph Mercola is one notable example of a DO who advocates pseudoscientific ideas, quackery, and anti-medical sentiments. The FDA always has to watch him and has warned him several times for his illegal and unethical marketing practices.) -- Fyslee 01:42, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Neutrality box

I linked to this article from "essential oils" and was unfortunately only slightly surprised to come to the end of a long page and realize that it said very little about alternative medicine but a lot about its critics. The only unique information in this article is found in the first three paragraphs. Everything after the Table of Contents is just repeat after repeat of the same tired vituperative claptrap that old Dawkins bore has been bleating about for years. Come on, now. One good paragraph would have been plenty about doubts concerning the efficacy of alternative therapies, and to have actually described one or two of these therapies would not have gone amiss, either. Either this article needs drastic revision (i.e., starting from scratch), or it needs to be retitled "Criticisms of Alternative Medicine" or something like that. By the way, I took a look through a few of these talk pages, and while it is true that "allopathic medicine" is often used to describe somewhat deprecatorily what I will delicately call "mainstream medicine as practiced in the majority of healthcare facilities in the United States of America and as featured on such popular television programs as E.R., St. Elsewhere, and Grey's Anatomy, excepting certain episodes" by many practitioners and advocates of alternative therapies, by the same token "alternative medicine" is used in this article as a pejorative description of anything else. I bet when most people come here looking for information on "alternative medicine" they want information on traditional, complementary (or yes, possibly actually alternative) therapies because what is scientifically tested is not always enough - and it would be nice is they found it. Yes, the scientific method is a fantastic tool for discerning the safety and efficacy of a technique/substance/whatever, but using this tool is often costly, beyond the capabilities of most, and most importantly, time-consuming. Not everyone has time to wait.

What all these high-falootin' words are trying to say is: Chill, freaks. We don't all need nurse-maiding.

James P McLanahan

P.S. I NEVER write this kind of thing anywhere to anyone on any sort of board-type thing, ever, and I'm very angry at all of you for making me do it. And I'll never come back to read the replies, so don't bother insulting my mother, 'cause I won't know. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 4.245.66.69 (talk) 10:31, 10 December 2006 (UTC).

Stop complaining about Wikipedia contributors - they're doing the best they can. It's clear that the article needs improvement, do contribute if you have something of encyclopedic value to add. Narssarssuaq 11:53, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
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