Alternative Medicine Online: A Guide to Natural Remedies on the Internet - Softcover

Moss, Ralph W.

9781881025108: Alternative Medicine Online: A Guide to Natural Remedies on the Internet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1881025101 ISBN 13: 9781881025108

Publisher: Equinox Pr, 1997

Provides a guide to Web sites covering such topics as acupuncture, breathing, crystals, relaxation, urine therapy, and visualization

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From the Author:

Online Guide to Alternative Medicine
Hi! I am Ralph Moss, author of Alternative Medicine Online. I wanted to tell you how and why I came to write this book.

Alternative Therapies Online is a guide to the most informative and interesting websites relating to non-conventional medical treatments. These run the gamut from U.S. government sites to some really far-out sources. But my main criterion was that the site be original and worth visiting. The style of this book is somewhat different from my other books. I was very amused by much of what I found and lightened up a bit in the writing. I felt free to point out the humor, or even the absurdity, of some of the beliefs and practices found under the Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) umbrella. I had fun writing Alternative Medicine Online and I hope you have fun reading it.

My plan is to update the book every two years so that it remains relatively current.

I myself really appreciate the power of the Internet in the field of medical research. When I wrote Cancer Therapy in the early 1990s, I needed to access online medical databases through various expensive vendors. At a blistering 2,400 bauds (and a surcharge of $24 to $36 per hour) this added up to thousands of dollars. But it also saved me many trips to the New York Academy of Medicine library, and I was sold on the potential of the computer to widen the scope of research.

When I was appointed an advisor to the NIH�s Office of Alternative Medicine in 1992, I joined the fledgling online committee. Members of this committee were then sent to Chapel Hill, NC to investigate Sunsite, one of the earliest repositories of information on the Net. Up until to that point neither I nor anyone in our group had actually seen this mythical beast, the Internet�so you can imagine our sense of anticipation as we arrived in North Carolina for our first demonstration. However, every effort by our hosts to actually connect to the Internet failed! We flew home crestfallen, having heard a bunch of lectures, but with no more practical knowledge than we had previously possessed. It wasn�t a good omen--and in fact it took the OAM five full years to finally get its own website in operation.

As everyone knows, within a few years all this changed in the dramatic explosion of the Net into every aspect of life. Simultaneously, interest in CAM grew exponentially, and in fact the two phenomena were related, since many people got their first introduction to CAM on the Net.

When I look back on the last decade I am astonished by how much easier it is to access information nowadays. The question might even occur, �What do I need a guidebook to the Internet, when I�ve got the Web itself at my fingertips.� However, I think the explosion of information has only increased the need for experience and intelligence in interpreting this information. For that reason, a sensible and humorous guidebook to CAM on the Net will always be needed. Alternative Medicine Online fits into that niche and its continuing steady sales are testimony that it fills that need for many people.

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