Keeping a critical eye on chiropractic.

This article discusses the importance of professional self-regulation and critical appraisal of information. A list of red flags is offered that could be used when analyzing information, scientific articles, or attending educational events.

Homeopathy--quackery or a key to the future of medicine?

This is an edited transcript of a debate held at the University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut, USA on 25 October 2007. Homeopathy is a widely used but controversial form of complementary and alternative medicine. Six distinguished international speakers, including advocates and skeptics concerning homeopathy, debated the plausibility, theoretical principles, clinical and basic research evidence, ethical and other issues surrounding homeopathy.

Norman Cousins Lecture. The uses and abuses of psychoneuroimmunology: a global overview.

Studies of interactions between the nervous and immune systems that effect immunological and behavioral changes are relevant to our understanding biological issues pertinent to evolution, ethology, ecology, and aging, in addition to our understanding the immune and nervous systems per se. Psychoneuroimmunology also relates to homeland security, science education, and the practice of conventional as well as complementary and alternative medicine. This paper will highlight just some of these global implications of psychoneuroimmunology.

[The miraculous growth of "quackery funds"]. / De wonderbaarlijke opkomst van de 'kwakfondsen'.

In 1998 and 1999 three new charity foundations were established in the Netherlands, covering the same areas as the Dutch Heart Foundation, the Netherlands Cancer Foundation and the National Rheuma Foundation respectively. Analysis of the set-up of the three new foundations, of their philosophy, their constitutions and the background of the persons involved shows a remarkably uniform pattern, making it very likely that the set-up of these alternative foundations is a part of the marketing strategy of some Dutch wholesalers in orthomolecular drugs. More legal regulation of charity foundations is seriously needed.

The social implications of questionable cancer therapies.

Questionable or "unorthodox" treatments are not selected in a vacuum; their degree of popularity and the particular types used are functions of their social and cultural context. The liquid preparations that were popular earlier in this century reflected fascination with bottled medicinals, consistent with the growing era of pharmaceutical medicine. Today's questionable remedies are similarly consistent with their social and cultural context. "Metabolic" therapies emphasizing diet, self care, vitamins, and internal cleansing, along with "immune-enhancing" regimens, represent today's reigning "alternatives." Such approaches reflect underlying social trends and values, such as belief in assuming personal responsibility for one's health, the importance of self care and physical fitness, patients' rights movements, dietary emphases encouraged by conventional and alternative medicine alike, the holistic medicine movement, and general disaffection with organized medicine. Just as questionable therapies are born of the values and beliefs of their culture, so these treatments and their use affect the social environment in which they exist. The relationship is reciprocal and cyclic, with social trends encouraging particular forms of questionable regimens and these regimens, in turn, reinforcing prevailing social beliefs. Public beliefs about cancer were reflected in responses to our studies of unorthodox cancer therapies and of psychosocial correlates of survival. Responses revealed widely held values and beliefs about cancer, cancer treatment, and medicine generally. These themes are described.