If you are looking for a list of alternative and complementary therapies, along with descriptions of each, you'll find an extensive list in this book. There are very old therapies, some developed thousands of years ago, like acupuncture. They are intermingled with some of the newest therapies such as the Raindrop Technique, first cited in 2003. Each is listed with a web reference so you can get more information.
No claims are made as to the worthiness or evidence that any of these therapies actually work. Readers of this book are advised to use the guidelines for verifying the credibility of any therapy.
- Short reviews of 100+ complementary and alternative therapies (CAM)
- Web links are provided for each therapy
- Encourages patients to keep an open mind about CAM
- Good information about dealing with health insurance for CAM
- Therapy descriptions are not necessarily objective
- Too much reliance on information from websites that stand to make money from the therapy
- Too little emphasis on evidence basis
- User comments about therapies have no identification
- Publisher: Loving Healing Press
- ISBN: 978-1-932690-36-1
- Year Published: 2007
- Hardover Price: N/A
- Softcover Price: $19.95
- Book Details: 191 pages
If you are interested in understanding the scope of complementary and alternative therapies available, this book is a good place to start. It covers a remarkable variety of therapies, plus some supportive information such as how to choose a health insurance plan knowing you'd like to participate in CAM.
The usual alternative and complementary methods are included, such as yoga, reiki or massage. Others are newer, high tech and little known, such as Psych-K or Rife. Still others seem to be recombinations of other therapies such as the One Brain System or Orgone Therapy.
Some therapies, such as spirituality, animal-assisted therapy or journaling aren't usually thought of as being complementary or alternative.
For the most part, each description seems straightforward. There is no intent to convince the reader to try them; only to inform the reader that the therapy exists.
The conclusion to the book makes recommendations for the future of CAM, and how it should be regarded by mainstream, conventional medicine, even the United States government.
There are some real shortfalls to this book:
- There is very little information about scientific evidence.
- Web links are provided so the reader can learn more about each therapy, but most of those references are to the websites that profit by practicing or supporting the therapy. Those websites lack objectivity. Other links are to Wikipedia's descriptions. Wikis cannot be considered credible on their own.
- The book would have been improved by providing links to both subjective and objective information, if not information provided by skeptics, too.
- The testimonial type comments about each therapy bother me. The author states they are anonymous, collected from a variety of sources. That only makes me question if they are real, or made up by the practitioners of each therapy.
