Alternative medicine will maintain its appeal until crowdpleasing articles of faith like chi lose their believability. This book provides succinct, nonevaluative descriptions of more than 1,200 unnaturalistic health-related methods. The trouble is, promoters of particular methods tend to describe them in generalities and with buzzwords. The greater part of alternative healthcare is a cottage industry removed from the scientific community. Synonyms for each method are in parentheses.
Pronunciations are in brackets.
Capitalization in, hyphenation in, and italicization of names generally stem from the prevailing proponent style. The entries emphasize theory, claims, and context. It may seem cavalier to judge a method solely on the basis of the theory that underlies it, the method's context, its history, and the credibility or implausibility of claims for the method. But such information furnishes valuable clues, especially when pertinent scientific findings are nonexistent, meager, or discrepant. Relatively few of the unnaturalistic methods of medical alternativism have been the object of scientific experimentation, and these few have, at best, proved to be of questionable medical utility.