Alternative medicine is any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine despite lacking biological plausibility, testability, repeatability or evidence of effectiveness. Unlike modern medicine, which employs the scientific method to test plausible therapies by way of responsible and ethical clinical trials, producing repeatable evidence of either effect or of no effect, alternative therapies reside outside of medical science and do not originate from using the scientific method, but instead rely on testimonials, anecdotes, religion, tradition, superstition, belief in supernatural "energies", pseudoscience, errors in reasoning, propaganda, fraud, or other unscientific sources. Frequently used terms for relevant practices are New Age medicine, pseudo-medicine, unorthodox medicine, holistic medicine, fringe medicine, and unconventional medicine, with little distinction from quackery.
John Wiley & Sons, Inc., commonly known as Wiley, is an American multinational publishing company founded in 1807 that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books, journals, and encyclopedias, in print and electronically, as well as online products and services, training materials, and educational materials for undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education students.
Craniosacral therapy (CST) or cranial osteopathy is a form of alternative medicine that uses gentle touch to feel non-existent rhythmic movements of the skull's bones and supposedly adjust the immovable joints of the skull to achieve a therapeutic result. CST is a pseudoscience and its practice has been characterized as quackery. It is based on fundamental misconceptions about the anatomy and physiology of the human skull and is promoted as a cure-all for a variety of health conditions.
Anthroposophic medicine is a form of alternative medicine based on pseudoscientific and occult notions. Devised in the 1920s by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) in conjunction with Ita Wegman (1876–1943), anthroposophical medicine draws on Steiner's spiritual philosophy, which he called anthroposophy. Practitioners employ a variety of treatment techniques based upon anthroposophic precepts, including massage, exercise, counselling, and substances.
Edzard Ernst is a retired British-German academic physician and researcher specializing in the study of complementary and alternative medicine. He was Professor of Complementary Medicine at the University of Exeter, the world's first such academic position in complementary and alternative medicine.
Hindawi is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature. It was founded in 1997 in Cairo, Egypt, but purchased in 2021 by John Wiley & Sons, a publishing company based in the United States. The company has its headquarters in London, an office in Cairo, and a virtual office address in New York City.
Contrast Media & Molecular Imaging is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by John Wiley & Sons since 2006 and by Hindawi Publishing Corporation since 2017. It covers the areas of contrast agents and molecular imaging, covering all areas of imaging technologies with a special emphasis on magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, but also all other in vivo imaging technologies such as x-Ray, CT, ultrasound etc. The current editor-in-chief is Luc Zimmer, professor of pharmacology at the . On 1 January 2017, the journal became fully open access due to a publishing partnership between John Wiley & Sons and the Hindawi Publishing Corporation, where the journal "remain[s] a Wiley title but will be published and hosted by Hindawi". Molecular imaging articles concentrate on the potential role played by MRI and PET contrast agents at visualizing, at the molecular or cellular level, the physiology and physio-pathological processes from animal models to humans.
MDPI is a publisher of open access scientific journals. Founded by Shu-Kun Lin as a chemical sample archive, it now publishes over 390 peer-reviewed, open access journals. MDPI is among the largest publishers in the world in terms of journal article output, and is the largest publisher of open access articles.
Hepatitis Monthly is a monthly peer-reviewed open access medical journal published by Brieflands Publishing, formerly known as Kowsar Publishing. Kowsar was included on Beall's List prior to the list's shutdown in 2017. The journal was established in 2002 by Seyed-Moayed Alavian, who is the journal's editor-in-chief.
Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial is a 2008 book by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst. The book evaluates the scientific evidence for alternative medicines such as acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine, and chiropractic, and briefly covers 36 other treatments. It finds that the scientific evidence for these alternative treatments is generally lacking. The authors concluded that homeopathy is merely a placebo.
The African Journal of Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicines is a peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering research on medicinal plants, traditional medicine, complementary alternative medicine, and food and agricultural technologies. It is included on Jeffrey Beall's list of "Potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals".
Marketing Theory is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the field of marketing. The editors-in-chief are Pauline Maclaran and Elizabeth Parsons. It was established in 2001 and is published by SAGE Publications.
Harald Walach is a German parapsychologist and advocate of alternative medicine.
Frontiers Media SA is a publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific journals currently active in science, technology, and medicine. It was founded in 2007 by Kamila and Henry Markram. Frontiers is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, with other offices in the United Kingdom, Spain, and China. In 2022, Frontiers employed more than 1,400 people, across 14 countries. All Frontiers journals are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
PeerJ is an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences. It is published by a company of the same name that was co-founded by CEO Jason Hoyt and publisher Peter Binfield, with initial financial backing of US$950,000 from O'Reilly Media's O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and later funding from Sage Publishing.
Oncotarget is a primarily oncology-focused, peer-reviewed, open access journal. The journal was established in 2010 and is published by Impact Journals. The editors-in-chief are Mikhail Blagosklonny and Andrei V. Gudkov.
Aging Cell is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal and an official journal of the Anatomical Society. It is published on their behalf by John Wiley & Sons. It was established in 2002. Its editor-in-chief is Monty Montano. The journal covers research on all aspects of aging, publishing research articles, reviews, minireviews, and commentaries.
Complementary Therapies in Medicine is a peer-reviewed medical journal covering complementary and alternative medicine, a field often designated as pseudoscience. It was established in 1986 as Complementary Medical Research, obtaining its current name in 1993. Although it was originally published three times per year by Routledge, it is now published eight times per year by Elsevier. The editor-in-chief is Kathi Kemper.
Cureus, Journal of Medical Science, is a web-based peer-reviewed open access general medical journal using prepublication and post publication peer review. It is also the first academic journal which provides authors with step-by-step templates for them to use to write their papers. The journal's founding editors-in-chief are John R. Adler and Alexander Muacevic.
Tumor Biology is a bimonthly peer-reviewed open access medical journal covering clinical and experimental oncology. It was established in 1980 as Oncodevelopmental Biology and Medicine, obtaining its current name in 1984. It is owned by the International Society of Oncology and BioMarkers, of which it is the official journal. Originally published by Karger Publishers, it moved to Springer Science+Business Media beginning in 2010. In December 2016, the journal moved again, this time to SAGE Publications. The editor-in-chief is Magdalena Chechlinska. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2016 impact factor of 3.650.
