''Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine'' is a bimonthly

peer-reviewed Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...

medical journal A medical journal is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that communicates medical information to physicians, other health professionals. Journals that cover many medical specialties are sometimes called general medical journals. History The first ...

covering

alternative medical treatments Alternative or alternate may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Alternative (''Kamen Rider''), a character in the Japanese TV series ''Kamen Rider Ryuki'' * ''The Alternative'' (film), a 1978 Australian television film * ''The Alternative ...

. It publishes case reports, original research papers, and

systematic review A systematic review is a Literature review, scholarly synthesis of the evidence on a clearly presented topic using critical methods to identify, define and assess research on the topic. A systematic review extracts and interprets data from publ ...

s. It was established in 1995 by founding editor

Larry Dossey Larry Dossey (born 1940) is a physician and author who propounds the importance for healing of prayer, spirituality, and other non-physical factors. Biography Dossey was born in Groesbeck, Texas. According to his written biography on his perso ...

and is published bimonthly by InnoVision Health Media. The current

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

is Andrew W. Campbell.

Founding and content

When it launched, it was one of several journals about

alternative medicine Alternative medicine is any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine despite lacking biological plausibility, testability, repeatability, or evidence from clinical trials. Complementary medicine (CM), complementary and alt ...

that were aimed primarily at doctors; it and similar journals carried advertisements for "unproven

homeopathic Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. It was conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Its practitioners, called homeopaths, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a dise ...

products,

shark cartilage Shark cartilage is a dietary supplement made from the dried and powdered cartilage of a shark; that is, from the tough material that composes a shark's skeleton. Shark cartilage is marketed under a variety of brand names, including Carticin, Cart ...

, naturopathic remedies and other health food store items oriented toward

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

David Gorski David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist, professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and a surgical oncologist at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, specializing in breast cancer surgery. He is an out ...

on the website

Science-Based Medicine ''Science-Based Medicine'' is a website and blog with articles covering issues in science and medicine, especially medical scams and practices. Founded in 2008, it is owned and operated by the New England Skeptical Society and run by Steven N ...

pointed out that United States Senator

Tom Harkin Thomas Richard Harkin (born November 19, 1939) is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as a United States senator from Iowa from 1985 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously was the U.S. representative for Iowa' ...

(who was instrumental in drafting the legislation that funded the Office of Alternative Medicine but later criticized the self-same office's reliance on

evidence-based Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the idea that occupational practices ought to be based on scientific evidence. While seemingly obviously desirable, the proposal has been controversial, with some arguing that results may not specialize to indivi ...

testing) wrote two different commentaries in the journal's inaugural issue:

In these two articles, Harkin basically introduced the new journal as a “journey—an exploration into what has been called ‘left-out medicine,’ therapies that show promise but that have not yet been accepted into the mainstream of modern medicine.” and explicitly stated that “mainstreaming alternative practices that work is our next step.” Unfortunately, he had a bit of a problem with the way medical science goes about determining whether a health practice—any health practice—works and railed against what he characterized as the “unbendable rules of
randomized clinical trials A randomized controlled trial (or randomized control trial; RCT) is a form of scientific experiment used to control factors not under direct experimental control. Examples of RCTs are clinical trials that compare the effects of drugs, surgical te ...
.” Citing his use of
bee pollen Bee pollen, also known as bee bread and ambrosia, is a ball or pellet of field-gathered flower pollen packed by worker honeybees, and used as the primary food source for the hive. It consists of simple sugars, protein, minerals and vitamins, ...
to treat his allergies, went on to assert, “It is not necessary for the
scientific community The scientific community is a diverse network of interacting scientists. It includes many " sub-communities" working on particular scientific fields, and within particular institutions; interdisciplinary and cross-institutional activities are als ...
to understand the process before the American public can benefit from these therapies....”

... Truly, this was a profound misunderstanding of how science works.

Elsewhere on the website, Jann Bellamy, Florida attorney and founding member of the Institute for Science in Medicine, described the journal as being "of dubious scientific rigor".

Staff

The journal's founding editor-in-chief was

. In 2004 Mark Hyman was appointed as chief editor, and in November 2008 David Riley, the journal's former medical editor, was appointed to the role. The editorial staff changed in 2010, leading the editorial board to resign, but their names remained on the masthead as of 2013. The editor-in-chief, as of 2013, was Andrew W. Campbell, and the journal's website listed him as practicing medicine in Texas, but in 2011 he was barred from practicing medicine in Texas and was apparently practicing in Florida. The

Texas Medical Board The Texas Medical Board (TMB) is the state agency mandated to regulate the practice of medicine by Doctors of Medicine (MDs) and Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine (DOs) in Texas. The Board consists of 12 physician members and seven public members ap ...

had taken repeated action against Campbell because he "relied on junk science, ordered inappropriate tests, and improperly diagnosed 'toxigenic mold exposure.'"

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in

Current Contents ''Current Contents'' is a rapid alerting service database from Clarivate Analytics, formerly the Institute for Scientific Information and Thomson Reuters. It is published online and in several different printed subject sections. History ''Cur ...

/Clinical Medicine,

Index Medicus ''Index Medicus'' (''IM'') is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, ''Index Medicus'' was a comprehensive b ...

MEDLINE MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the ...

Science Citation Index Expanded The Science Citation Index Expanded – previously entitled Science Citation Index – is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and created by Eugene Garfield. It was officially launched in 1964 and ...

, and

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...

'', the journal has a 2015

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

of 1.329.

References

External links

*{{Official website, http://www.alternative-therapies.com/ Alternative and traditional medicine journals Publications established in 1995 Bimonthly journals English-language journals