Review: The Duke Encyclopedia of New Medicine–Conventional and Alternative Medicine for All Ages

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Best in Class Overview–Follow On Volume Warranted, July 23, 2008

Duke Center for Integrative Medicine

Below I list links to two other “alternative” or natural medicine books, and above I post a slide that I created as I contemplate a new book on Health Intelligence.

Unlike the other two books, this book is an overview book that integrates both conventional and “alternative” or natural medicine as commonly developed by both the Chinese (more structured, easier to access and exploit) and the Indian (more verbal and not as documented).

For this book to come out of Duke University (the “Harvard” of the South, but a powerhouse in its own right) is easily worth a fifth star, as Duke appears to be, along with the University of Washington, one of a tiny handful of institutions that is committed to balancing a very unreliable, wasteful, and often deceptive “conventional” medicine program (big phrama and lots of elective surguries that are not evidence-based), with natural cures including lifestyle and behavior or preference patterns that have been proven over centuries in China and India, but deliberately repressed, censored, subverted and scorned by the American Medical Association, which exists largely to protect a very badly broken medical “practice” that is closer to witch doctoring than it is to evidence-based holistic health.

I am very pleased to see that the publisher and Amazon have made it possible to “look inside” this excellent book, so my normal remediation is not necessary. This book is a “class act” in every possible sense of the word, from content to organization to presentation to glosary and index. It is true that “encyclopedia” may not be completely appropriate, “overview” might be a better term, but I have to give all those associated with this book real credit for taking the giant leap forward in integrating Part I, a Catalog of Health Conditions with Part II, Complementary & Alternative Therapies.

The book earns one of its stars for its emphasis on Prevention. I fear that more critical reviewers are missing the paradigm-shift in the forest due to their micro-focus on a specific condition about which they have deep knowledge. I regard this book as a true pioneering endeavor, one with huge credibility, and one extremely meritorious and worthy of follow-up.

The volume I would really like to see next from Duke would examine the true costs to society, and the true costs to heal (with an emphasis on the cost of prevention and the cost of natural cures), for each of the diseases covered in volume one. If we can articulate, in cold hard proven numbers, the costs, the common sense of the public will take us to the next leve.