Nature Rx: Reemergence of Pediatric Nature-Based Therapeutic Programs From the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Across the United States, physicians are prescribing patients nature. These "Nature Rx" programs promote outdoor activity as a measure to combat health epidemics stemming from sedentary lifestyles. Despite the apparent novelty of nature prescription programs, they are not new. Rather, they are a reemergence of nature-based therapeutics that characterized children's health programs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These historic programs were popular among working-class urban families, physicians, and public health officials. By contrast, adherence is a challenge for contemporary programs, especially in socially disadvantaged areas. Although there are differences in nature prescription programs and social context, historical antecedents provide important lessons about the need to provide accessible resources and build on existing social networks. They also show that nature-and its related health benefits-does not easily yield itself to precise scientific measurements or outcomes. Recognizing these constraints may be critical to nature prescription programs' continued success and support from the medical profession.

[Homeopathy, alternative medicine: between counterculture, the New Era, and formalization (Brazil, 1970s)]

The objective of this text is to analyze how homeopathy was conveyed to the lay public in Brazil during the 1970s, an important period in the process of legitimizing this practice as a medical specialty, which occurred in 1980. The sources analyzed (composed of articles that circulated in the Jornal do Brasil and books intended for the lay public) allow the reader to distinguish different interlocutors with various expectations of homeopathy, revealing a heterogeneous universe of understandings and uses for this medical system. At the same time, the sources establish a universe of representations present in the construction of homeopathy as alternative medicine, which is noticeable in its relationship with the counterculture movements and New Era in forming a "consuming public" for homeopathy.

The Gonzalez Best Case Series Presentation to the NCI: 25 Cases, 25 Years Later

No Abstract Available.

[Advice and treatment from the clairvoyant Croiset]

Around 1960, the Dutch clairvoyant Gerard Croiset (1909-1980) was consulted by 'people with symptoms - considered to be unexplained - such as paralysis or neurological disorders'. I searched the archive of the Johan Borgman Fund Foundation for the effect of Croiset's advice and treatment in patients with these symptoms who might have had the diagnosis of conversion disorder. Contrary to my expectations, Croiset treated no patients with conversion disorder. His advice and treatment were successful in patients with poliomyelitis, epilepsy, lumbar disc prolapse and infantile encephalopathy. Four of his patients had been insufficiently stimulated by the first person who treated them to improve their remaining muscular strength through exercise; symptoms of anxiety had not been investigated sufficiently in two patients; and in one patient the treating professional had adhered too rigidly to the set treatment. Alternative healers are apparently not only successful with patients with unexplained symptoms, and their success is not always the result of a placebo effect.

Aristophanes’ Wealth: Ancient Alternative Medicine and its Modern Survival

The miraculous cure of the blind god Plutos (‘Wealth’) in Aristophanes’ play illuminates some of the reasons why people have sought help in alternative medicine over the ages. Apart from limitations of conventional medicine these factors can be social, political, religious, psychological, and scientific. Alternative medicine may function in a complementary way to the conventional. Nevertheless, an overestimation of its therapeutic potentials by the public can lead to the domination of irrationalism, all in the name of liberation from the shackles of a mechanistic rationalism.

The schism in chiropractic through the eyes of a 1st year chiropractic student

Since its inception, the chiropractic profession has been divided along ideological fault lines. These divisions have led to a profession wide schism, which has limited mainstream acceptance, utilisation, social authority and integration. The authors explore the historical origins of this schism, taking time to consider historical context, religiosity, perpetuating factors, logical fallacies and siege mentality. Evidence is then provided for a way forward, based on the positioning of chiropractors as mainstream partners in health care.

Alternative Medicine: Contagion and Cure in Karel Čapek's The White Plague

Though written amid an atmosphere of unprecedented medical advance in both diagnosis and therapeutics, Karel Čapek's The White Plague takes a starkly critical stance against overconfidence in medical science and its dubious ethical orbit. This article explores Čapek's censure of those who would privilege scientific interest in disease over the holistic plight of the sufferer. Provocatively, Čapek achieves this not only via the play's content, but also-prefiguring aspects of contemporary live art practice by several decades-by placing audience members in worrying proximity to abject ill bodies. Čapek proposes a sort of theatrical homeopathy, suggesting that limited exposure to the threat of disease might spur spectators toward empathy for those who suffer and promote a healthier, more compassionate society.

The History of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the US

2006 marked the 40th year of publication for The Annals. Throughout its history, The Annals has provided important contributions to the development of clinical pharmacy. In 2007, we are continuing to publish articles reflecting on the history of clinical pharmacy through the eyes of practitioners, including those pioneering clinical pharmacy, as well as those who have more recently entered the profession and a well-established specialty. In addition, we are presenting articles and editorials from the early history of The Annals that have given direction and shape to the practice of clinical pharmacy (see page 1268).

A Case Study of the Neti Pot's Rise, Americanization, and Rupture as Integrative Medicine in U.S. Media Discourse

In a period of only one decade in the United States, the neti pot shifted from obscure Ayurvedic health device to mainstream complementary and integrative medicine (CIM), touted by celebrities and sold widely in drug stores. We examine the neti pot as a case study for understanding how a foreign health practice became mainstreamed, and what that process reveals about more general discourses of health in the United States. Using discourse analysis of U.S. popular press and new media news (1999-2012) about the neti pot, we trace the development of discourses from neti's first introduction in mainstream news, through the hype following Dr. Oz's presentation on Oprah, to 2011 when two adults tragically died after using Naegleria fowleri amoeba-infested tap water in their neti pots. Neti pot discourses are an important site for communicative analysis because of the pot's complexity as an intercultural artifact: Neti pots and their use are enfolded into the biomedical practice of nasal irrigation and simultaneously Orientalized as exotic/magical and suspect/dangerous. This dual positioning as normal and exotic creates inequitable access for using the neti pot as a resource for increasing cultural health capital (CHC). This article contributes to work that critically theorizes the transnationalism of CIM, as the neti pot became successfully Americanized. These results have implications for understanding global health practices' incorporation or co-optation in new contexts, and the important role that popularly mediated health communication can play in framing what health care products and practices mean for consumers.

On TB Vaccines, Patients' Demands, and Modern Printed Media in Times of Biomedical Uncertainties: Buenos Aires, 1920-1950

Reconstructing some of the experiences of people living with tuberculosis in Argentina in the first half of the twentieth century, as reflected not only in written and oral accounts but also in individual and collective actions, this article explores the ways in which patients came to grips with medical expertise in times of biomedical uncertainty. These negotiations, which inevitably included adaptations as well as confrontations, highlight a much less passive and submissive patient-physician relationship than is often assumed. Though patients were certainly subordinate to medical doctors' knowledge and practices, that subordination, far from absolute, was limited and often overthrown. The article focuses on patients' demands to gain access to a vaccine not approved by the medical establishment. By engaging with media organizations, the sick invoked their "right to health" in order to obtain access to experimental treatments when biomedicine was unable to deliver efficient therapies.

[The company Willmar Schwabe in the Nazi era]

This essay follows the history of the Schwabe Company between 1933 and 1945 when it, like all other companies at the time, had to subject to the state-enforced conformity ('Gleichschaltung'). While Willmar Schwabe II (1878-1935), the company's second director, kept clear of Nazi politics, both of his sons, who succeeded him at an early age, became members of the Nazi party: Willmar III (1907-1983) probably from initial conviction and Wolfgang (1912-2000), who joined in 1937, more likely for opportunistic reasons. The two lay journals published by Schwabe--the Leipziger Populäre Zeitschrift für Homöopathie and the Biochemische Monatsblätter--embraced the Nazi ideology more thoroughly than the general homeopathic journal Allgemeine Homöopathische Zeitung, including above all contributions on racial hygiene. Our research has revealed that Schwabe only employed foreign workers from 1942 on, that their number was much lower, at 0.9 per cent in 1942 and 3.6 per cent in 1944, than that of other pharmaceutical companies and that their pay hardly differed from that of German workers. The sales and profit figures investigated have shown that the company did not profit exceptionally from the new Nazi health policies ('Neue Deutsche Heilkunde'): while its sales and profits rose in the Nazi era due to the increased use of medication among the civil population during wartime, the drugs produced by Schwabe remained marginal also during the war, as is apparent also from its modest deliveries to the army. All in all one can conclude that the company offered neither resistance nor particular support to the Nazi ideology.

Physicians and alternative medicines in "The Barber of Seville" by Gioachino Rossini: A bicentennial debate

BACKGROUND

The year 2016 marks the bicentennial anniversary of the premiere of "The Barber of Seville" by Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868). This opera buffa, one of the most renowned in the world, puts on stage a sharp criticism against the physicians of that time in favour of empiric healers, respectively represented by the doctor Bartolo and the barber Figaro.

METHODS

The paper analysed both the opera by Rossini and the French comedy "Le Barbier de Séville" (1775) by Pierre Beaumarchais (1732-1799), on which the Italian composer based his own play.

RESULTS

The unlearned barber Figaro is portrayed as a poor but wise guy, while his rival, the graduated doctor Bartolo, is defined as an arrogant and opulent old physician. Dr. Bartolo's incompetence, lack of skill and ignorance are evident in the works by Rossini and Beaumarchais. Both plays show empiric and unskilled medicine triumphs over academic medicine, which appears weak in its scientific concepts and corrupted by money.

CONCLUSIONS

Arrogance, presumption and carelessness among physicians are a danger nowadays as they have been for a couple of hundred years, since they may not only lead to misjudgement and errors, but also to an increase of alternative medicines and strange healing remedies.

Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654): London's first general practitioner?

Nicholas Culpeper is often regarded as an ill-disciplined, maverick, mid-17th century herbalist and the father of contemporary alternative medicine. There are elements of this statement that have some truth but to dismiss his contribution to the development of health provision in London at the time would be a great injustice. Culpeper did not complete his apprenticeship as an apothecary and was not a formally trained physician, but he developed a clinical practice for the poor of London, indistinguishable from the role of the present day general practitioner. Observers at the time recognised his concern and compassion and his commitment to treat the whole patient and not just the disease. His enduring contribution was his translation from Latin of the physicians' Pharmacopoeia Londinensis which could be regarded as the first major step towards the demystification of medicine. Culpeper's London Dispensatory and the many other medical treatises that followed were affordable and widely available to the common man. Culpeper antagonised both apothecaries and physicians because he breached the regulations of the day by accepting patients directly. So perhaps Culpeper was, de facto, London's first general practitioner, at least 150 years before the role was formally recognised in the Apothecaries Act 1815.

Conservative Treatment of Stress Urinary Incontinence In Women: A 10-Year (2004-2013) Scoping Review of the Literature

Stress urinary incontinence is a serious threat to the well-being of women world-wide. In this scoping review of the literature, we examined the most prominent research foci between the years 2004 and 2013. In this article, conservative treat-ment is operationalized as any non-surgical or non-pharmacological treatment modalities that could be carried out by specially trained nurses, physiotherapists, or physicians to treat stress urinary incontinence in women. The two most frequently described or systematically investigated treatment options identified in our review were 1) strengthening pelvic floor muscles with pelvic floor muscle training, including biofeedback and weighted vaginal cones; and 2) the use of intravaginal support devices, such as incontinence pessaries. Other treatment modalities were also explored in the literature review, such as intraurethral devices, behavioral and lifestyle interventions, products, and alternative therapies, such as acupuncture and acupressure. However, the focus of this article is on the two most frequently described options.

The education of Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651-1708)

Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, mathematician, inventor, and correspondent of Spinoza, is often thought to have studied medicine at Leiden, though documentation of this fact has been lacking. Tschirnhaus' medical education is here documented, along with the nature of his medical practice.

[Nosode and sarcode therapies and their history--a controversial inheritance]

Nosodes and sarcodes (homeopathic remedies gained primarily from disease products respectively organs of human or animal origin) are groups of drugs which were added to the homeopathic Materia Medica in the 1830s. Most substances used in nosode or sarcode therapy have a long medical tradition, with some even going back to the pre-Christian period. My contribution first describes therapeutic practices that use these substances and then juxtaposes them with their use in the early days of homeopathic nosode and sarcode therapy. The investigation shows, on the one hand, that there are aspects common to both approaches that go far beyond the mere choice of substances. On the other hand, it demonstrates the effect the inclusion of human or animal body substances in the homeopathic Materia Medica has had on homeopathy, as their use is no longer in line with what is considered rational.

Clinical experience in late antiquity: Alexander of Tralles and the therapy of epilepsy

Alexander of Tralles, writing in the late sixth century, combined his wide-ranging practical knowledge with earlier medical theories. This article shows how clinical experience is used in Alexander's works by concentrating on his therapeutic advice on epilepsy and, in particular, on pharmacology and the group of so-called natural remedies. I argue that clinical testing is used not only for the introduction of new medicines but also as an instrument for checking the therapeutic effect of popular healing practices. On another level, this article discusses Alexander's role as the author of a medical compendium; it suggests that by marking the cases of clinical testing with a set of recurrent expressions, Alexander leads his audience to reflect on his medical authority and personal contribution.

[Universal elixir of Thomas-Nicolas Larcheret (1819) and his elixirian and normal doctrine]

Thomas-Nicolas Larcheret, teacher in singing, declamation, guitar or lyre and violin, author of music and books, but also inventor of the universal elixir by his name, is a good example of quack of the 19th century. His book Larcheregium ou Dictionnaires spéciaux de mon élixir, ainsi que toute ma doctrine et de mes adhérens (Larcheregium or special Dictionaries of my elixir, as well as all my doctrine and my adherents), published in 1819, deserves a deep study to show the most frequently used arguments by the ones who emphasize the value of their secret remedy. The opportunities are there to present themselves as victims of medical authorities, experts and authorities as a whole, that do not recognize the value of their product. The only acceptable judge for them is the experience reported by the patients who are able to demonstrate the efficacy of the product since they do buy it (probably at a very high price). From this viewpoint, the book of Larcheret is a good example of turning the authorities down and of diatribe against physicians and pharmacists. It is also the demonstration that, even with the Empire's new regulations against secret remedies and quacks, they will still persist for a large part of the 19th century in France.

The history and progression of treatments for allergic rhinitis

This article intends to place new treatments in the context of allergic rhinitis (AR) treatment history. The medical literature was searched for significant advances and changes in AR treatment. Historical data on AR treatment options and management were selected. Reviews of AR management published throughout the 20th century were included to provide context for treatment advances. Modern AR treatment began in the early 20th century with immunotherapy and was soon followed by the emergence of antihistamine therapy in the 1930s. Numerous treatments for AR have been used over the ensuing decades, including decongestants, mast cell stabilizers, and leukotriene receptor antagonists. Topical corticosteroid options were developed the 1950s, and, added to baseline antihistamine therapy, became the foundation of AR treatment. Treatment options were significantly impacted after the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbon propellant aerosols because of environmental concerns. From the mid-1990s until recently, this left only aqueous solution options for intranasal corticosteroids (INSs). The approval of the first hydrofluoroalkane propellant aerosol INSs for AR in 2012 restored a "dry" aerosol treatment option. The first combination intranasal antihistamine/INSs was also approved in 2012, providing a novel treatment option for AR. Treatment of AR has progressed with new therapeutic options now available. This should continue to move forward with agents to alter the allergic mechanism itself and impact the disease burden that has a significant impact on patient outcomes.

[Acupuncture, animal magnetism, and French medical orthodoxy (1780-1830)]

This article analyses why the French phenomenon of acupuncture was confined to the 1810s-1820s. It argues that the French medical orthodoxy played a decisive role. First, we recount the history of the French reception of Japanese acupuncture from the late 17th century to the 1820s. Second, we go back to the animal magnetism trial to find some explanatory tools for the decline of French acupuncture. Third, we show that the oppositions to both therapies were not mere juxtapositions, but due to the growing strength of medical orthodoxy. Finally, we suggest a model of analysis of the French medical orthodoxy of the early 19th century through a set of multidimensional oppositions: anthropological (imagination/reason), epistemological (to heal/to explain), therapeutic (drug/fluid), nosological (organic disease/functional disease), and lastly, economic, moral and political oppositions (doctor/charlatan).

[Vindicianus and the theory of temperaments]

Vindicianus, in his Epistula to Pentadius, refers to a 'latinized' edition of an Hippocratic medical work which is not the De natura hominis nor any other Hippocratic text. The recent edition of the pseudohippocratic De pulsibus et de temperamentis corporis humani clearly proves that the Epistula is a translation of this text. The article discusses the question of the attribution of the Epistula, already problematized by J. Jouanna, its dating and its sources, surely including the pseudohippocratic De pulsibus et de temperamentis, but also a more ancient medical tradition, at least referring to Pseudoarist. Probl. 30,1.

"An object of vulgar curiosity": legitimizing medical hypnosis in Imperial Germany

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, German medical hypnotists sought to gain a therapeutic and epistemological monopoly over hypnosis. In order to do this, however, these physicians were required to engage in a complex multi-dimensional form of boundary-work, which was intended on the one hand to convince the medical community of the legitimacy and efficacy of hypnosis and on the other to demarcate their use of suggestion from that of stage hypnotists, magnetic healers, and occultists. While the epistemological, professional, and legal boundaries that medical hypnotists erected helped both exclude lay practitioners from this field and sanitize the medical use of hypnosis, the esoteric interests, and sensational public experiments of some of these researchers, which mimicked the theatricality and occult interests of their lay competitors, blurred the distinctions that these professionals were attempting to draw between their "legitimate" medical use of hypnosis and the "illegitimate" lay and occult use of it.

[Health and salvation: the Mazdaznan-movement in the context of its beginnings]

There are diverse religious groups which have developed special forms of "methodical lifestyle" (Max Weber). Projects of life reform and new religious movements around 1900 brought up specific ways of living and influenced one another in respect to ideas and practices. Using the example of the Mazdaznan-Movement some forms of interdependencies will be demonstrated. Since the group formed in the U.S.A. at the turn of the 20th century I will try to contextualize its central practices such as vegetarianism, intestinal care and breathing exercises within the specific context of American cultural and religious history.

The AMS/Paterson Lecture: becoming alternative? Modern transformations of Chinese medicine in China and in the United States

"Becoming Alternative" offers an overview of the transformations of Chinese medicine at home and abroad since the mid-19th century. After coming into contact with biomedicine, China's indigenous medicine was redefined in terms of national culture and history on the one hand, and a competitive alternative science on the other. Reimagined in terms of scientific syncretism in the PRC, and embraced as a counter-cultural alternative to bio-medicine in the United States, the medicine we call "Chinese" today emerges as a pluralistic system with global reach involving complex accommodations with local medical cultures and institutions both at home and abroad.

[Images of gender and gender-specific therapies in German homoeopathic and naturopathic guidebooks (c. 1870-1930)]

In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century sex and gender became crucial categories not only in the medical discourse of German speaking countries. At the very centre of this discourse was the idea of women as the weaker sex. Because of the paradigm shift in the history of medicine (due to the discovery of the cytopathology) the principle of a weaker sex seemed to be corroborated by scientific research, a fact which impacted on medical practice in many ways. "Nervous" disease evolved as the major threat "of our times," with urban girls, young women and "weak" young men being most at risk. At the same time homoeopaths and naturopaths challenged modern medicine, offering alternative health practices, cures and drugs for people who could not afford the help of physicians or distrusted them. An analysis of several alternative medical guidebooks printed between c. 1870 and 1930 showed that homoeopaths and naturopaths shared the "sexualization" of medical discourse and practice only to an extent. On the one hand they believed that disorders such as hysteria, masturbation, chorea Sydenham and anaemia were nervous in nature and that the chances of curing them were poor. With the exception of masturbation these "deadly" threats were considered to be typically female. The general approach of alternative physicians, on the other hand, was unisex. The cures they offered to the public used unisex scales of constitutional characters. They even ignored the gender specificity of sick headaches. Gender-specific problems such as difficult deliveries and childbed fever were treated as "natural" and mild cures were favoured. The conclusion is that the influences of upper and middle class discourse on common health practices should not be overestimated.

There is no alternative medicine

The term 'alternative medicine' is a misnomer because it suggests that there are two kinds of medicine alternative to each other. Although commonly used, the term is problematic. It escapes a meaningful definition, and 'alternative medicine' cannot be clearly differentiated from 'conventional medicine'. The nature of 'alternative' in 'alternative medicine' is anything but clear. In addition, bundling all the so-called alternative therapies under one heading is misleading. Due to the purely rhetoric nature of the 'alternativity', there seems to be no such thing as 'alternative medicine' in any meaningful sense.

The Thomsonian movement, the regular profession, and the state in antebellum Connecticut: a case study of the repeal of early medical licensing laws

The Thomsonian movement, founded by Samuel Thomson, was the first major challenge to the therapies and the social and economic standing of the orthodox medical profession in the United States. In the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century, many states chartered a state medical society with power to administer a licensing law that placed at least a nominal penalty on practicing without a license. However, in the 1830s and 1840s, under pressure by proponents of the Thomsonian system, almost all legislatures reversed themselves and removed all restrictions on medical practice. This paper reexamines the rise and fall of medical licensing using Connecticut as a case study. Antebellum legislative controversies over licensing have never been described in detail at the state level--where the drama took place--integrating the perspectives of both the medical regulars and Thomsonian botanical physicians, and state politics. Connecticut is a particularly useful case study because, except for New York, its seven-year battle from 1836 to 1842 over the medical society's charter was the most protracted in the country. How was the campaign structured? To what extent did the licensing restrictions matter? What role did the state-level Democratic party play? Thomsonianism in Connecticut, I suggest, was more professionalized and conservative than historians have often portrayed this movement. This account shows that the state's Thomsonian physicians were not anti-professional or opposed to education, but rather used the politics of the antebellum era to challenge the medical law and legitimize themselves as an alternative form of practice.

[Investigations about concept and history of apitherapy--a contribution to complementary alternative medicine]

Since a few decades one can recognize a continuous boom of Complementary Alternative Medicine (CAM). Against this background in the present manuscript the conceptual, historical and methodical requirements of the so-called Apitherapy, which has been in an institutionalization process since approximately four decades ago, are investigated. As one result of these investigations the bee venom therapy is here characterized as the real root of this relative new stream within the natural medicine. Its history and theory will be exposed in detail in a following article.

"Because I was in pain, I just wanted to be treated": competing therapeutic goals in the performance of healing HIV/AIDS in rural Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is experiencing one of the most severe AIDS epidemics in the world, with an estimated one out of seven people infected with HIV. For both palliative care and pragmatic treatment of HIV-related opportunistic infections, people turn to Un'anga (the traditional system of health and healing), not as a substitute for Western therapeutics but as an alternative explanatory model for the diagnosis and management of illness. Through the use of highly charged symbols and ritualized communication, n'angas (traditional healers) seek to transform patients' understandings and experiences of HIV-related illness. Using performance theory and discourse analysis, this article seeks to expand our understanding of how competing therapeutic goals in the performance of healing affect the structure and content of performance, its subsequent meaning, and the therapeutic effect on those afflicted with HIV.

[A terrible accident--the treatment of severe brain injury in the thirteenth century]

The remarkably modern ideas of Lanfranc of Milan (circa 1245-1315) concerning diagnosis, therapy and teaching are demonstrated by a case-history from his 'Chirurgia Magna' (AD 1296). Judging by the chapter on skull injuries, the advanced level of Lafranc's practice was not equalled by the later Middle Dutch authors such as Jan Yperman and Thomas Scellinck van Thienen.

[The socio-cultural bases of alternative therapeutic practices]

The emergence and development of alternative therapies comprised part of the counter-cultural movement initiated in the 1960s. In the health field of the western world, the social transformations that occurred at that time inaugurated a period in which diverse health cultures coexisted. In this work we elaborate the socio-anthropological interpretations of cultural, political and socio-economic factors that influenced these transformations. First, we identify the macrocultural factors that would influence the transformations in the health field. Next, within this field we analyze the conflicts and disruptions that contributed to the search for new therapeutic practices. We use text analysis as the principal methodology, starting from the presupposition that the integrative approach of alternative therapies expresses an aspect of the transformation in the cultural values contemporaneous societies.