J Altern Complement Med. 1999 Dec; 5(6): 587-94.

Is the scientific publishing of complementary and alternative medicine objective?

Eskinazi D, Muehsam D.

Rosenthal Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, New York 10032, USA. [email protected]

Bias expressed by conventional journals against the field of "alternative," "integrative," or "complementary" medicine has been said to drive the appearance of new journals dedicated to this field. We examined two examples of recent articles on complementary and alternative medicine that appeared in two major medical journals in 1998. One is an editorial on the risks of alternative medicine, published in The New England Journal of Medicine and the other is a study on Therapeutic Touch, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. We evaluated whether information and opinions presented in this editorial and article are objective or not. We found that these examples reflect, at best, misinformation or misunderstanding of the field, or at worst, disingenuousness. We consider the possibility that this apparent bias may be due to the fact that some of the concepts implicit in alternative medicine are outside the current biomedical framework. Yet, it is only by exploring knowledge outside the boundaries of existing dogmas that real (as opposed to incremental) progress can occur.