The Desktop Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Edzard Ernst & Associate Editors Max H. Pittler, Clare Stevinson & Adrian White Published by Mosby Edinburgh 2001 . 454 pages, Price $34.95 , ISBN 07234 3207 4 If you, like me, have ever puzzled over the Feldenkrais method, or wondered what is Qi gong then help is at hand. What the authors have done here is to bring together into a desk-top manual, with an accompanying CD-ROM, an account of the commoner types of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) together with their own and others work, derived from systematic reviews, to examine its evidence base. By doing so they have provided a quick, accessible, guide for the practising clinician which should make it easier to discuss the issues with individuals seeking their advice or help in spotting when there might be, say, an interaction between a prescribed medicine and something obtained from a nonconventional source. With so many people resorting to nonprescribed preparations, if nothing else, their table of interactions between herbal remedies and anticoagulants is worth the price of the book. The section on herbal remedies will provide a quick answer to many of the commoner questions posed to pharmacologists and pharmacists. There are references throughout not only to the data backing up their conclusions but also giving entry points to references on most of the commoner forms of CAM. Whether it would be possible to quickly access some of these papers is debatable as a goodly number are in journals not stocked by most conventional medical libraries. What this book also does is to indicate where there is acceptable evidence for CAM, other areas where there remains doubt, and some where it can be rejected outright. The authors are not alone in this approach but they have made their conclusions readily accessible in the book and provided a CD where this information can be referred to rapidly. Plainly it is not possible to detail every modality of CAM in a book of this sort but the authors have been successful in producing a comprehensive and worthwhile guide that can be recommended to all clinicians, and to anybody else, who may want a readily accessible guide to the pitfalls and benefits of using complementary medicine – and medicines.