Customer Reviews

Science Meets Alternative Medicine: What the Evidence Says About Unconventional Treatments

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I teach a course on Complementary and Alternative Medicine to 4th and 5th year pharmacy students.
There are two assigned texts. One is on alternative medicine and the second is this book.
The book gives the student a broad range of articles from different authors. It presents it's arguments using a science based route of inquiry. It has made my students think about a subject that most of their future patients believe in.

I will use this book again.

How can consumers find objective, scientific information for evaluating new treatments and products? This provides an anthology of research articles by scientists, and is devoted to examining the claims of alternative medicines. From therapies to trends and the psychological ramifications of belief, this packs in many fine tip for understanding alternative medicine's claims.

The title should be something like, "I Hate Alternative Medicine: Why You're a Moron if You Disagree with Me." The author goes out of his way to argue against every type of alternative or complementary medicine he can think of with sketchy-at-best "scientific statistics" to back up his claims. I found the book to be an enormous waste of my time, which is sad since I was excited to read what I thought would be some much needed guidance on how to decide which alternative therapies to buy into and which to avoid. It's not that the author is necessarily wrong, it's just that he presents his case in a way that's almost as hysterical and paranoid as the case by alternative practitioners against conventional medicine. I couldn't even get through the whole thing...I made it about 80% of the way through before I gave up because my eyes hurt from rolling them so frequently.