This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Timothy Gorski, MD
Arlington, Tex

JAMA. 1996;276(3):195-196.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In the Resident Forum calling for resident physicians to look more favorably on "alternative medicine," Dr Dyer¹ equates the term with "treatments and practices that have not gained wide acceptance or have not yet had adequate scientific research to be considered standard medical treatment." However, doing so fails to distinguish what is usually meant by alternative medicine from legitimate emerging medical science, which includes, for example, the use of methotrexate to treat ectopic pregnancy. It would be more accurate to say that alternative medicine refers to treatments and practices that are claimed to be safe and effective but remain unproven (or in many cases disproven) or based on unscientific ideas about health and disease (ie, medical quackery).

Thus, while spinal manipulation has been shown to have benefits for acute musculoskeletal-related low back pain in adults,^2,3 it hardly seems appropriate, much less ethical, to spend scarce . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?