Complementary Medicine in Clinical Practice, by David P. Rakel and Nancy Faass. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers; 2006. 553 pages, paperback.
What attracted me to this edited book were the titles of several sections, such as Expanding the Continuum of Care, Mind-Body Medicine, Self-Care, Therapeutic Massage, Acupuncture, Chiropractic, and Herbal Therapy. However, upon closer scrutiny I found the content to be a hodge-podge of undeveloped ideas.
Chapter 2, Who Uses Complementary Medicine, in contrast to most other chapters, provides clear, useful, and logically developed ideas. However, nowhere in this chapter does it indicate that exercise and nutrition should be considered complementary medicine (most mainstream clinical practitioners will provide information on these topics), and yet there are subsequent sections on both of these topics. Even if you consider exercise and nutrition to be complementary, some of the specific chapters within these 2 sections are clearly not, such as Medically Supervised Exercise and Laboratory Testing for Food Allergies.
More important, the chapters are very uneven, with literally dozens of them (yes, I mean dozens as this book contains an astonishing 70 chapters) only a couple of pages long with vague content that does not appear to me to be helpful to most readers. Instead of including 70 chapters, many of which are obviously quickly constructed, I would have preferred fewer chapters presented in more depth. I would also have preferred the content among chapters to be better coordinated. For example (I could provide many, but one will suffice), in 2 separate chapters-written by the same author-I found almost identical content on abdominal breathing.
Typical of the lack of depth to be found in most chapters is Chapter 35 on Clinical Massage. The content was useful in that it identified the most frequently provided massage techniques. Yet many of the 34 (!!) massage techniques in this brief chapter are described in a single sentence or, in the chapter author's version of depth, 2 or 3 sentences. Many of the other chapters in this book are similarly superficial.
Despite these shortcomings, the book is not without merit. There is a startling array of material, and for someone who wants to incorporate complementary medicine into their clinical practice is sure to find content that is interesting or useful. There are 3 chapters, for instance, that consist entirely of resources (acupuncture, massage, and chiropractic) that are likely to be useful in a search for more information. Anyone seeking depth on any single topic in this volume, however, will be disappointed.
David Haber
Professor, Fisher Institute for Wellness and, Gerontology, Ball State University, Muncie, Ind