BoTox: Alternative Medicine does Not Exist
I guess the following authors disagree with you boTox. An excerpt from their abstract follows:
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Searching biomedical databases on complementary medicine: the use of controlled vocabulary among authors, indexers and investigators
Linda S Murphy1 , Sibylle Reinsch2 , Wadie I Najm3 , Vivian M Dickerson4 , Michael A Seffinger5 , Alan Adams6 and Shiraz I Mishra7
1Science Library Reference Department, University of California, Irvine, P.O. Box 19557, Irvine, CA 926233-9557, USA
2Department of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation, University of California, Irvine, Medical Center, 101 City Drive, Orange, CA 92868, USA
3Department of Family Medicine, University of California, Irvine, Medical Center, 101 City Drive, Orange, CA 92868, USA
4Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, University of California, Irvine, Medical Center, 101 City Drive, Orange, CA 92868, USA
5Department of Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, Western University of Health Sciences, 309 E. 2nd St., Pomona, CA 91766-1854, USA
6Office for Academic Affairs and Office of the Provost, 212 Westcott Building, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA
7Office of the Dean, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific, Western University of Health Sciences, 309 E. 2nd St., Pomona, CA 91766-1854, USA
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2003 3:3
The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/3/3
Received 25 April 2003
Accepted 7 July 2003
Published 7 July 2003
© 2003 Murphy et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article: verbatim copying and redistribution of this article are permitted in all media for any purpose, provided this notice is preserved along with the article's original URL.
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Outline Abstract
"The increasing research in Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) and the importance placed on practicing evidence-based CAM require ready access to the CAM scientific literature. The optimal retrieval of a literature search in biomedicine depends on the appropriate use of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), descriptors and keywords among authors, indexers, and investigators [1]. It has been recognized that available online databases covering CAM differed in their thesaurus construction and indexing procedures, making effective and efficient searching difficult [2].
"The controlled vocabulary for biomedicine has been developed and continuously updated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). It is referred to as the NLM Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). The purpose of MeSH is to provide uniformity and consistency to the indexing of the biomedical literature [3].
"With the recent development of CAM on PubMed [4,5], MeSH descriptors for CAM have been expanded.
"As of December 2002, there were a total of 21,973 MeSH descriptors found in the NLM Medical Subject headings – Annotated Alphabetic list, 2002 [6].
"While the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has identified over 360 healing modalities, MeSH currently included only 83 descriptors for CAM, arranged hierarchically under the sets of terms in Complementary Therapies[7].
"In 2001, there were only 41 MeSH descriptors for CAM, arranged under Alternative Medicine[8].
"Cross-references have been available to assist searchers in finding the most appropriate MeSH Heading, for example,
Alternative Medicine see Complementary Therapies[9].
"Therapeutic Cults was the MeSH descriptor between 1963 and 1993. It was only in 1994 that the term
Alternative Medicine was implemented in the NLM MeSH thesaurus."
