The latest addition to the University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate school's Why Files (first mentioned in the August 9. 1996 Scout Report) is about alternative medicine and the actual biological effects that alternative medicine has on the human body. For many years, alternative medicine was considered "quackery", but this Web site presents some of the science behind the placebo effect and...

During World War I, doctors and librarians in the United States joined forces to provide books to soldiers recovering in hospitals. Many librarians, such as Louise Sweet, a hospital librarian at the United States Army General Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, believed that it was important to select (or, if you will "prescribe") the correct books for convalescing soldiers. The correct books,...

Dave Robertson and James Strohecker have trademarked the phrase "Self-Managed Care" as the theme for their comprehensive Website devoted to educating consumers and professionals on alternative and complementary health and medicine. While HealthWorld Online contains a mixture of conventional western medicine and alternative therapies, visitors are more likely to find, for example, a recipe for an...

This Web site from the Integrative Medicine Service of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) provides oncologists and other healthcare professionals with objective information on medicinal herbs and other botanicals. Users may search for a particular plant name or browse the entire catalog by letter of the alphabet. Searches yield a clinical summary for each plant, a description of...

Part of the National Institutes of Health, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) "is dedicated to exploring complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science, training complementary and alternative (CAM) researchers, and disseminating authoritative information to the public and professionals." Some of the many NCCAM research...

Popular in early nineteenth-century Europe (especially in Britain), and later in America, phrenology was the controversial belief that one could determine the character and intellectual traits of a person by examining the shape and contours of the skull ("reading the bumps on your head"). Created and maintained by John van Wyhe of Cambridge University, this site claims to be "the largest and most...