Alternative Health on the Web

More and more Americans are seeking an alternative to the traditional Western approach to health care.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that visits to alternative health practitioners are up 47 percent since 1990, most often for treatment of chronic problems. This trend is also evident in the growing number of Web sites that offer alternative health information. Outside of searching for specific types of therapies, such as homeopathy, herbal medicine or massage, there are some general sites that offer good starting points.

Two of the larger Web indexing sites provide good places to begin your searching. Yahoo's Alternative Medicine page at http://dir.yahoo.com/Health/Alternative_Medicine/ and the Miningco.com's page at http://altmedicine.miningco.com/mbody.htm?COB=home&PID=2729, both offer an array of specialty links. There is some duplication on these pages, but many are different, so a visit to both is beneficial. Another outstanding site compiled by our colleagues at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., is Alternative Medicine Health Care Information Resources at http://www-hsl.mcmaster.ca/tomflem/altmed.html. This site is a little lengthy but very complete, and the annotated listings make selecting sites easy.

If you are researching alternative medicine, the Health Sciences Library has compiled a guide to library resources, Alternative Medicine and Holistic Health Resources http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/hsl/ref/guides/Altermed.html. There is also a list of Internet sites at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/hsl/ref/internet.html#complementary and a list of the library's multimedia programs on alternative medicine at http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/hsl/mrc/altmed.html. On the national level, Congress has responded to the growth in the alternative-medicine industry by appropriating $50 million to establish the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Part of the prestigious National Institutes of Health, its Web site at http://altmed.od.nih.gov/nccam/ can give you up-to-date information on the various fields of practice, research and grant opportunities, and their newest addition, the CAM Citation Index with 180,000 bibliographic citations on alternative medicine extracted from the Medline database.

For more information on alternative health resources, contact the Health Sciences Library by phone at 829-3335 or email askhsl@acsu.buffalo.edu.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web via University at Buffalo computer accounts, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Sue Neumeister and Lori Widzinski, University Librarie