Mainstreaming Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Studies in Social Context

by Philip Tovey (Editor), Gary Easthope (Editor), Jon Adams (Editor)

Overview

Stepping back from the immediate demands of policy-making, Mainstreaming Complementary and Alternative Medicine allows a complex and informative picture to emerge of the different social forces at play in the integration of CAM with orthodox medicine. Complementing books that focus solely on practice, it will be relevant reading for all students following health studies or healthcare courses, for medical students and medical and healthcare professionals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415266994
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/27/2003
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Philip Tovey, Gary Easthope, Jon Adams

Table of Contents

Transversal lines to lines and intervals, Jorge L. Arocha, Javier Bracho, and Luis Montejano; on a shortest path problem of G. Fejes, Toth Donald R. Baggett and Andras Bezdek; a short survey of (r,q)-structures, Vojtech Balint; lattice points on the boundary of the integer hull, Imre Barany and Karoly Boroczky, Jr; the Erdos-Szekeres problem for planar points in arbitrary position, Tibor Bisztriczky and Gabor Fejes Toth, separation in totally-sewn 4-polytopes, Tibor Bisztriczky and Deborah Oliveros, on a class of equifacetted polytopes, Gerd Blind and Roswitha Blind; chessboard Ramsey numbers, Jens-P. Bode, Heiko Harborth, and Stefan Krause; maximal primitive fixing systems for convex figures, Vladimir Boltyanski and Hernan Gonzalez-Aguilar; the Newton-Gregory problem revisited, Karoly Boroczky, arrangements of 13 points on a sphere Karoly Boroczky and Laszlo Szabo; on point sets without k collinear points, Peter Brass; the Beckman-Quarles theorem for rational d-spaces, d even and d> 6, Robert Connelly and Joseph Zaks; edge-antipodal convex polytopes - a proof of Talata's conjecture, Balazs Csikos; single-split tilings of the sphere with right triangles, Robert J. MacG. Dawson; vertex-unfoldings of simplicial manifolds, Erik D. Demaine, David Eppstein, Jeff Erickson, George W. Hart, and Joseph O'Rourke; view-obstruction through trajectories of co-dimension three Vishwa C. Dumir and Rajinder J. Hans-Gill; fat 4-polytopes and fatter 3-spheres, David Eppstein, Greg Kuperberg, and Gunter M. Ziegler; arbitrarily large neighbourly families of congruent symmetric convex 3-polytopes, Jeff Erickson and Scott Kim; on the non-solidity of some packings and coverings with circles, August Florian and Aladar Heppes; on the mth Petty numbers of normed spaces Karoly Bezdek, Marton Naszodi and Balazs Visy; cubic polyhedra, Chaim Goodman-Strauss and John M. Sullivan; new uniform polyhedra, Branko Grunbaum; on the existence of a convex polygon with a specified number of interior points, Kiyoshi Hosono, Gyula Karolyi and Masatsugu Urabe; on-line 2-adic covering of the unit square by boxes, Janusz Januszewski and Marek Lassak; an example of a stable, even order quadrangle which is determined by its angle function, Janos Kincses; sets with a unique extension to a set of constant width, Marton Naszodi and Balazs Visy; the number of simplices embracing the origin, Janos Pach and Mario Szegedy; Helly-type theorems on definite supporting lines for k-disjoint families of convex bodies in the plane, Sorin Revenko and Valeriu Soltan; combinatorial aperiodicity of polyhedral prototiles, Egon Schulte; sequences of smoothed polygons, G.C. Shephard; on a packing inequality, Graham, Witsenhausen and Zassenhaus, Jorg M. Wills; covering a triangle with homothetic copies, Zoltan Furedi; open problems, Andras Bezdek.

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Martha J. Greenberg, PhD, RN (Pace University)
Description: This unique book is a compendium of social inquiry critiques dealing with the use and provision of CAM therapies in light of a three major themes: consumer movement; trends, policies and commercial issues that CAM practitioners must engage with, and boundary blurring and overlap of CAM providers. The implications of evidence-based medicine/practice and CAM therapies are also discussed.
Purpose: The authors' aim is to present sociologically informed, contextualized analyses of CAM, which contrasts with other books on CAM that are more likely to pose answers to questions relative to the usage, efficacy etc. of CAM therapies. The array of essays presented by the contributors give thoughtful consideration to the main three themes: consumption, the marketplace, and boundary issues of practice.
Audience: The book will benefit CAM academics and practitioners, health sociologists, medical students, nurses, and general practitioners. The editors drew the many contributors from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, who are authorities in the subject matter as practitioners, scholars, and/or researchers.
Features: The main theme of the book, the recognition that CAM is historically contingent and a social product (unlike orthodox medicine) threads throughout the book. The chapters discussing the CAM consumer movement (one without a leader and driven by individual consumer choice in societies) is intriguing, as is the ubiquitous and essential chapter on evidenced-based medicine/practice. Viewed as "perhaps the core policy challenge," this chapter discusses the idea that the emphasis on clinical outcomes in EBM, (rather than the scientific understanding of processes) will help to judge CAM on the same criteria as orthodox medical therapies.
Assessment: This is an interesting and informative book that is unique in the field. It provides a broad basis upon which to examine the interest in, growth of, and practice of CAM therapies.

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