The development of Alternative Medicine from 1965 to 2000: A keyword & key-concept approach - Softcover

Alternative medicine, especially: acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, herbal medicine and Qigong came into sight in the Western Europe in the 1960s. The beginnings of this modern system of medicine, grounded in the heritage of the traditional non- academic medicine, were not welcomed by the well established orthodox medicine. This study attempts to evaluate the process of the expansion of alternative medicine into the medical world through the examination of article titles in the categories of acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, herbal medicine and Qigong in the period of 1965 - 2000, taken from the PubMed Central Webside. The corpus made of the article titles was with the Wmatrix software for the keywords and the semantic fields. These in turn were analysed to observe the patterns and tendencies in the scientific medical scrutiny applied to alternative medicine. The analysed data does show that alternative medicine has attracted enormous interest from the orthodox medicine and has won the respect orthodox medicine.

Henryk Dyczek is practicing and teaching both acupuncture and chiropractic (www.henryk-dyczek.torun.pl.). He is a graduate of the College of Traditional Acupuncture, U.K., Oxford University, U.K., Lancaster University, U.K. and the University of Lodz, Poland. At present he is a PhD student.