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At his death from cancer, journalist John Diamond had completed six chapters of "an uncomplimentary look at the world of complementary medicine". Written with total candour and his usual wit, they appear here together with a selection of emails, press articles, and excerpts from his final notebook.
'Alternative' medicine is now used by one in three of us. In the UK we spend an estimated £4.5 billion a year on it and its practitioners are now insinuating themselves into the mainstream. There are methods based on ancient or far-eastern medicine, as well as ones invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many are promoted as natural treatments. What they have in common is that there is no hard evidence that any of them work. Treatments like homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic are widely available and considered reputable by many. Ever more bizarre therapies, from naturopathy to nutraceuticals, ear candling to ergogenics, are increasingly favoured. Endorsed by celebrities and embraced by the middle classes, alternative medicine's appeal is based on the spurious rediscovery of ancient wisdom and the supposedly benign quality of nature. Surrounded by an aura of unquestioning respect and promoted through uncritical airtime and column inches, alternative medicine has become a lifestyle choice. Its global market is predicted to be worth $5 trillion by 2050. Suckers reveals how alternative medicine can jeopardise the health of those it claims to treat, leaches resources from treatments of proven efficacy and is largely unaccountable and unregulated. In short, it is an industry that preys on human vulnerability and makes fools of us all. Suckers is a calling to account of a social and intellectual fraud; a bracing, funny and popular take on a global delusion.
This lively, introductory text provides nurses with the foundations of a sociological understanding of health issues, explaining the key theories and debates with humour and imagination in a way that will encourage an inquisitive and reflective approach.
In this book, the physician and philosopher Raymond Tallis yokes together his diverse intellectual interests to address important questions about our well-being. In a series of stimulating and impassioned arguments, he establishes the truth about, among many other things, recent health scares, explains why patients compete for our doctors' and nurses' time; why the exploding popularity of alternative therapies is actually bad for our health; and how one man's view of the MMR vaccine influenced a nation. This is the summation of a lifetime's thought and medical practice, by one of Britain's most original thinkers. It will, quite simply, change for ever the way we think about ourselves and our health.
Analysing Qualitative Data in Psychology equips students and researchers in psychology and the social sciences to carry out qualitative data analysis, focusing on four major methods (grounded theory, interpretative phenomenological analysis, discourse analysis and narrative analysis). Assuming no prior knowledge of qualitative research, chapters on the nature, assumptions and practicalities of each method are written by acknowledged experts. To help students and researchers make informed methodological choices about their own research the book addresses data collection and the writing up of research using each method, while providing a sustained comparison of the four methods, backed up with authoritative analyses using the different methods.
The first collection of essays from renowned scientist and best-selling author Richard Dawkins is an enthusiastic declaration, a testament to the power of rigorous scientific examination to reveal the wonders of the world. In these essays Dawkins revisits the meme, the unit of cultural information that he named and wrote about in his groundbreaking work The Selfish Gene. Here also are moving tributes to friends and colleagues, including a eulogy for novelist Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; correspondence with the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould; and visits with the famed paleoanthropologists Richard and Maeve Leakey at their African wildlife preserve. The collection ends with a vivid note to Dawkins's ten-year-old daughter, reminding her to remain curious, to ask questions, and to live the examined life.
This book explores the challenging issues associated with complementary and alternative medicine in the context of the social, political and cultural influences that shape people's health. Divided clearly into three sections, this book: sets out the general context of social change, consumption and debate around the rise of public interest in CAM argues for and against different classifications of CAM critically assesses the importance of ethics and values to CAM practice and how these inform what practitioners do focuses on the question of what people want, the changing and contested nature of health, and the nature of personal and social factors associated with the use of CAM, leading to a focus on 'therapeutic relationships' examines the diversity of settings in which CAM takes place and the social, political and economic milieu in which CAM is provided and used. Together with its accompanying text, Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Structures and Safeguards, it forms the core text for the Open University course K221 Perspectives on Complementary and Alternative Medicine.