Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine

When it launched, it was one of several journals about alternative medicine that were aimed primarily at doctors; it and similar journals carried advertisements for "unproven homeopathic products, shark cartilage, naturopathic remedies and other health food store items oriented toward cancer."[2] David Gorski on the website Science-Based Medicine pointed out that United States Senator Tom Harkin (who was instrumental in drafting the legislation that funded the Office of Alternative Medicine but later criticized the self-same office's reliance on evidence-based testing) wrote two different commentaries in the journal's inaugural issue:

In these two articles, Harkin basically introduced the new journal as a "journey—an exploration into what has been called 'left-out medicine,' therapies that show promise but that have not yet been accepted into the mainstream of modern medicine." and explicitly stated that "mainstreaming alternative practices that work is our next step." Unfortunately, he had a bit of a problem with the way medical science goes about determining whether a health practice—any health practice—works and railed against what he characterized as the "unbendable rules of randomized clinical trials." Citing his use of bee pollen to treat his allergies, went on to assert, "It is not necessary for the scientific community to understand the process before the American public can benefit from these therapies...."

... Truly, this was a profound misunderstanding of how science works.[3]

Elsewhere on the website, Jann Bellamy, Florida attorney and founding member of the Institute for Science in Medicine,[4] described the journal as being "of dubious scientific rigor".[5]

The journal's founding editor-in-chief was Larry Dossey.[1] In 2004 Mark Hyman was appointed as chief editor, and in November 2008 David Riley, the journal's former medical editor, was appointed to the role.[6][7] The editorial staff changed in 2010, leading the editorial board to resign, but their names remained on the masthead as of 2013.[8] The editor-in-chief, as of 2013, was Andrew W. Campbell, and the journal's website listed him as practicing medicine in Texas, but in 2011 he was barred from practicing medicine in Texas and was apparently practicing in Florida.[8] The Texas Medical Board had taken repeated action against Campbell because he "relied on junk science, ordered inappropriate tests, and improperly diagnosed 'toxigenic mold exposure.'"[9]

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Current Contents/Clinical Medicine,[10] Index Medicus/MEDLINE/PubMed,[11] Science Citation Index Expanded,[10] and Scopus.[12] According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2015 impact factor of 1.329.[13]

• Official website