Skip Navigation

This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (9)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Disclaimer
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Charlton, B.G.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Charlton, B.G.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

Q J Med 2002; 95: 643-645
© 2002 Association of Physicians

Editorial

Randomized trials in alternative/complementary medicine

B.G. Charlton, MD

School of Biology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne e-mail: bruce.charlton@newcastle.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The increasing trend for applying randomized trials to alternative medicine is part of a larger social project to ‘integrate’ orthodox and alternative medicine—an aspiration of doubtful merit1—and much hope has been pinned upon randomized trials to evaluate the effectiveness of alternative medicine.2 Thanks to the excessive zeal of the ‘evidence-based medicine’ movement, it is commonly believed that randomization procedures confer automatic validity on an investigation, and consequently, that randomized trials will be able to generate objective evidence concerning therapeutic effectiveness.

This viewpoint misunderstands both science and randomized trials. Randomized trials may serve as a stepping-stone by which individual treatments from alternative medicine are incorporated into the science-based system by which orthodox medicine treats pathologies. But trials alone cannot establish the validity of systems of alternative medicine because their hypotheses lack the precision and formal complexity required to be testable and generalizable.1,3,4

Alternative/complementary/fringe medical systems are frequently discussed, but seldom . . . [Full Text of this Article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Arch Intern MedHome page
E. Ernst
The "Improbability" of Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Arch Intern Med, April 26, 2004; 164(8): 914 - 915.
[Full Text] [PDF]