Posted by Larry Hoover on November 23, 2003, at 10:02:14
In reply to search for studies on alternative remedies, posted by Emme on November 23, 2003, at 8:38:05
> Hi. I want to dig up any good controlled studies on the efficacies of alternative remedies (e.g. amino acids, herbal remedies, minerals, vitamins, etc.) that have been published in reputable peer-reviewed journals. Does anyone have any recommendations for databases or search engines where I could find references? Besides PubMed.
>
> Thanks,
> EmmeWell, you can access a host of articles here, by going through each issue, and finding titles of interest:
http://www.thorne.com/alternative/back.html
They're fully referenced, so you can take title keywords from particular articles, plug them in at Pubmed, and then select "related articles" and see what turns up.
But Pubmed is a pretty darn good resource. You can limit the nature of what is returned for each search by selecting Limits>>>Subsets>>>Complementary Medicine
as an example.To search herbs, it's best to know species/genus identifiers.
The efficacy of many of the things you're wanting to study has not often been published in peer-reviewed journals. There's no money in it.
Cochrane Reviews does include some alternative topics. It's got a good search feature.
http://www.update-software.com/abstracts/crgindex.htm
Cochrane is the most conservative medical review in existence....anything they conclude is as reliable as you can get, because they won't consider evidence that isn't of the strictest quality. That said, they also fail to conclude anything, in many cases.
There's also nutrition.org. Most of the articles there are available as full-text, except really recent ones. It's heavily geeky though, and the search feature leaves much to be desired....it brings up hits that aren't hits at all, IMHO.
And for the nitty-gritty on nutrients themselves, there is probably no more complete resource than:
http://books.nap.edu/index.html
The is pretty much the US nutrition authority (the conservative version), where the "Bibles of nutrition" are published. Full text of all books are available (PDF format), and the appropriate information is massively referenced.
This is a search-return page from that site that brings up many books of interest:
http://lab.nap.edu/nap-cgi/discover.cgi?term=tolerable%20daily%20intake&restric=NAP
Then there's SuppBase:
http://www.dadamo.com/suppbase/suppbase.cgiThe Linus Pauling Institute (the guy who first promoted megavitamin therapy, and who coined the term orthomolecular) site:
http://lpi.oregonstate.edu/infocenter/contentnuts.htmlAnd, just for interest, there's:
http://www.indstate.edu/thcme/mwking/aminoacidderivatives.htmlMore government data:
http://ods.od.nih.gov/showpage.aspx?pageid=48The alternative perspective:
http://www.blionline.com/NHA/NutrientDetails.htmThe nutrient content of food:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ah/food/An herb database:
http://www.ars-grin.gov/duke/And, just to totally fry your brain, an essay that captures the nutrient "debate" rather well:
http://www.internetwks.com/pauling/hoffer.htmlHave fun, eh?
Glad to interpret anything, by the way.
Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:282778
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20031122/msgs/282795.html