Wikipedia

Wikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicine

Welcome to the WikiProject on Alternative Medicine.

WikiProject on
Alternative Medicine
CAM Portal
Use the best sources
Standards of Quality
To Do List

These project pages are only suggestions, as all WikiProjects are, that are designed to stop the madness of edit wars or editing articles in a never ending spiral of circular editing on articles related to alternative medicine.

Scope and goals

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This WikiProject aims primarily to facilitate the development of professional articles on all aspects of complementary, alternative and integrative medicine. The scope of this WikiProject will be referred to throughout our project pages simply as CAM (complementary and alternative medicine).

Scope

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The scope of a Wikiproject identifies the types of articles that participants of a project will be working on.

Goals

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  1. To improve the number and quality of articles edited by our participants.
    • To develop and promote standards of quality guidelines to be followed in CAM related articles participating in this WikiProject.
    • To help stabilize controversial CAM articles and reduce edit warring.
    • To support the use of the highest-quality sources, not merely the sources that support the "right" conclusions.
  2. To develop and promote classification systems that are suitable for comparing the various systems or schools of CAM to each other.
  3. To function as the centralized sounding board or watchlist for all CAM-related issues.
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Participants

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Participants in this WP:WikiProject may do as little or as much as they'd like. As with all Wikipedia articles, anybody may edit articles related to CAM.

You may place {{User WikiProject Alternative medicine}} on your user page to display the following userbox:

 This user is a participant in
WikiProject
Alternative medicine.

This template will add your user page to:


User name Talk page Special interests or contributions Additional Comments
John Gohde, aka Mr-Natural-Health Talk Natural health, natural therapy and Psychosocial or Mind - Body Interventions, as well as the founder and developer of this WikiProject.

Alternative Medicine covers a big topic area. My interest lies in the subset of topics covered by the intersection of Wellness Movement and Natural philosophy.

If pornography can be treated neutrally on Wikipedia, I see no reason why alternative medicine should not be.

I prefer to work on meta pages. In other words, on stuff that would really make a major impact. So, far things are going quite well. While the graveyard of portals that were never quite launched is vast and deep, I got our portal up in just one day.

I wont be spending much time here, unless I see more of a collaborative group effort taking place on this project. But, I will be checking in often enough to keep this project active. And, to see that the topic of Alternative Medicine on Wikipedia gets fairly treated. -- John Gohde (talk) 02:23, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ashibaka Talk alternative medicine and other areas of pseudoscience
Autumn Siegel Talk Herbal medicine, Ayurveda and Energy Therapy.
Heidimo Talk traditional Chinese medicine, medical intuition, auriculotherapy I have practical expertise in these fields as well as writing/proofreading/editing skills. I teach and write on these topics regularly.
Karen S Vaughan Talk Interested in forming a subproject on Herbalism. I have written or extensively modified a number of articles on herbs, herbalists and herbal medicine, adding references, correcting information from secondary sources and improving accuracy. Clinical herbalist and licensed acupuncturist in NY State, have written, been interviewed for books and television on the subject. Also certified in essential oils and have had various energy medicine trainings.
Greenman Talk
DryGrain Talk
xyberdoc Talk Homer Lim, MD from St Carlos Medical Center
ALargeElk Talk
SargonZ Talk First year osteopathic medical student at Touro University College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Smithfarm Talk
Ballista Talk
AnaBryce Talk This is one of my primary areas of interest. I have been learning and working with various alternative healing methods for about 4-5 years.
Merkinsmum Talk I've studied reiki and other forms of CAM But also scepticism, so think I can write with NPOV
William Courson Talk Interested in discussing all topics relevant to ayurvedic medicine and ayurvedic medical education in India and abroad. Special interests include ayurvedic 'subtle therapies' and the place of energy healing in ayurvedic praxis. Clinical herbalist and ayurvedic practitioner in New Jersey (USA). Author of numerous professional and popular articles on the subjects of ayurveda, herbalism (ayurvedic and western) and energy healing, esp. Reiki. Usui Reiki Master, also certified in Bach and other systems of flower essence therapy. Director, New Jersey Institute of Ayurveda (distance education program for ayurvedic practitioners). Principal, Vedic Energy Healing, L.L.C.
Fyslee Talk Interests: quackery, chiropractic, homeopathy, applied kinesiology, vaccine controversy, fanaticism, Hulda Clark, medical ethics, conspiracy theories, scientific method, etc.. Physical Therapist and Physicians Assistant, and (previously) assistant to MDs in cardiovascular research. As a former practitioner of alternative medicine and a scientific skeptic I can provide balance, since I can see things from both sides, having "been there and done that."
Friarslantern Talk personal experience with use (success, failure, and everything in between) of alt. med.; interest in the anthropology of alt. med & the socio-economic factors affecting science research as it relates to acceptance of alt. med. none
Anthon01 Talk
Remark_knights Talk Interests: Chinese medicine and philosophy, acupuncture, and meditation. Profile: I am an active acupuncturist in Berlin, NH. I also practice Chinese herbology.
MasterOfHisOwnDomain Talk Interested in Ancient Medicine, creator of Prehistoric medicine article
David_notMD Talk Evidence-based science in support of complementary and alternative medicine, with focus on dietary supplements and functional foods. PhD in nutritional biochemistry; 25 years working in industry; currently a science consultant to companies wanting to make health claims for their products
Mitchel2 Talk Tradition African medicine I'm new to Wikipedia and am doing a school project on Traditional African Medicine for my Shaping of the Modern World class at Duquesne University. It's taking me a while to get used to the wikimark-up and templates, so if anyone is able to help or edit my article that would be amazing. The goal of the project is to reach Good Article status, so hopefully I will be able to eventually get my article there and help further the alternative medicine project.
DJBarney24 Talk Lack of Encyclopaedic entries in the Alternative Medicine field While doing voluntary work for the Human Rights campaign group MindFreedom International I noticed a lack of NPOV and lack of obvious references in many articles. For example the Schizophrenia article has a single reference to R D Laing, at least in its current form. His name is not even mentioned in the main text and yet he is a major figure in this field. Perry is completely absent. Mosher and Soteria are in the main text but the text looks muddled and confusing. Editors do not seem to be aware of the wealth of references out there; "Although research evidence is limited", and yet they are there. For example you can see many of them here that I rescued from my local University.

Some alternative health practitioners like Dr Matthias Rath have accused Wikipedia of becoming a mouthpiece for commercially driven "mainstream" health (see here). His criticisms are valid but he makes the mistake of attacking Wikipedia. For instance, to use Rath as an example, he could join this WikiProject and do what everyone else is doing in other areas with NPOV problems. Judging by my work with MindFreedom this appears to be a major problem with people making valid edits, having them removed and then backing off never to return. So there appears to be a widespread misunderstanding in this field with what Wikipedia actually is and does, that can be addressed with some simple education. DJ Barney (talk) 13:53, 19 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Sebbi Talk Somatics - working with movement and touch in experiential learning processes I am a student of Choreography with Community Practice and a huge part of my training has been in somatics and release technique (a dance technique based on similar principles). My main area of study in this has been experiential anatomy, especially informed by the work of Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen. This work sees the human experience as a continuous whole, not recognising an absolute distinction between body and mind. In the next year or two I plan to begin post-graduate training as a Somatic Movement Educator.

I am interested in how different traditions relate and correlate with each other, or not.

Mdavid9 Talk Alchemy, Reiki, healing and everything related to energies I am a Master Alchemist and study everything related to energies, healing and emotions. Several articles contain inaccurate or incomplete information about several topics related to energies and alternative medicine. I won't spend time writing the major parts of the articles. However, when I find something wrong or missing, I'll tweak some information and comment about it. The undoing of valid edits is a major problem in controversial topics such as energies and alternative medicine. I am sure this can be resolved with proper communication and education.
Arunjith Puthussery Talk Ayurveda, Ayurvedic Ophthalmology, Shalakya Thantra Propagation of Ayurveda as a Science, and the existence of specialization in the field of Ayurveda
IRWolfie- Talk Pseudoscience FTN Regular
Victoria.Lee.Croasdell Talk Have been studying, teaching and practicing aspects of the Vedic Sciences since 1999 I have been making my own medicinal formulas for family use for many years.
depthdiver Talk Interested in body-centred practices. Wary of people's exploitation by 'cure-all' and often expensive, unsubstantiated treatments, so interested in scientific evidence to ensure rigor in our understanding of psychological, political and spiritual realities. Undergrad training as a physicist and love the clarity of maths and the rigor of science. Went on to the humanities, and drawn personally to yoga and body work. After a stint as a professional massage therapist completed a PhD on the philosophy and implications of mind-body techniques.


EMP Talk I am interested in the scientific research on meditation, yoga, fitness Personal interest in fitness and health, and what science has to tell us about these subjects


Docia49
Blindvei Talk Reflexology Teacher and practitioner since 1998.
Reefswaggie Talk I am a biologist with an interest in some alternative medicine topics. I practice yoga, meditation and martial arts.


Gudzwabofer Talk I'm a Bachelor of Health Science (Naturopathy) student. At the moment I'm seeing how I can improve the Naturopathy page. After that I guess I'll see where the rabbit hole leads.
Clr324 say hi! Herbalism and homeopathy I am biased, I support some forms of herbalism (many herbs contain active chemicals!) and I strongly oppose homeopathy. I will try to be neutral as much as possible though.
Anna jasmine33 Talk Traditional Natural remedies The listed links are physical remedies, but how about natural remedies? For example, what natural remedy can we take instead of ibuprofen?
xMiSSiL Talk Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine, orthomolecular medicine, Applied kinesiology, regenerative therapies, mesotherapy, prolotherapy I fight internet misinformation and try to update evidence with current research.
Trymianc Talk
Rp2006 Talk Scientific skepticism I work to fight BS on Wikipedia, in other words, information contradicted by or not backed by science.
Pyrrho the Skeptic Talk
Participant Name Participant talk Participant interests and contributions Participant comments

Standards of quality guidelines

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Our Standard of Quality Guidelines are the unofficial advice from our participants. They are not part of "official" Wikipedia policy, but they may provide useful advice. Similarly, the official guideline, WP:Manual of Style (medicine), is often useful.

This project fully supports the main content policies: WP:Verifiability of all material in published sources, WP:No original research or use of personal experiences by Wikipedians, and WP:Neutral point of view as determined by the overall balance of reliable sources. Be careful not to pretend that all viewpoints are equally accepted.

Substantial formal research has been conducted on CAM. Information about finding and understanding research papers is available at WP:Identifying reliable sources (medicine). To find recent medical articles about alternative medicine, look for recent reviews of complementary medicine in medical journals at PubMed.

Templates

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Infoboxes

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Many CAM articles benefit from inclusion of {{Infobox alternative medicine}}.

Project banner

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This project tags articles, lists, categories, and templates within its scope. To tag a page, paste {{WikiProject Alternative Medicine}} at the top of its talk page. The template looks like this:

 Alternative medicine Unassessed
 This article is within the scope of WikiProject Alternative medicine, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Alternative medicine related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Alternative medicineWikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicineTemplate:WikiProject Alternative medicineAlternative medicine articles
???This article has not yet received a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

We use the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment standards, and articles should be tagged as stub, start, C, or B class. (See section Article assessment)

NCCAM classifications

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The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) was renamed National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in December 2014.

These classifications have been adopted by our WikiProject. They are to be used for tagging only the branches of CAM articles. The article definitely should be mostly about CAM.

  1. {{Alternative medical systems}}
  2. {{Mind-body interventions}}
  3. {{Biologically based therapy}}
  4. {{Manipulative methods}}
  5. {{Energy therapy}}

Userboxes

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Participants may choose to paste {{User WikiProject Alternative medicine}} on their user pages. This displays this userbox:

 This user is a participant in
WikiProject
Alternative medicine.

CAM Portal

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Shortcut

Portals are pages intended to serve as 'Main Pages' for specific topics or areas. Portals may be associated with one or more WikiProjects; unlike WikiProjects, however, they are meant for both readers and editors of Wikipedia, and should promote content and encourage contribution.

This WikiProject supports Portal:Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Unlike normal articles, the content of portals are spread over dozens of different pages or files. Please do not edit the main CAM portal page without a working knowledge of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). However, you are encouraged to edit its many subpages, which work very much like regular articles.

The CAM Portal is built around 13 boxes in 10 rows. Each box is assigned a number in ascending order. When the portal page is displayed, either two boxes share one row, or one box fills the full width of the row.

Most of the boxes contain static information about CAM and this project, and these boxes are easy for anyone to improve. Just click on the edit hyperlink in the box's title bar, and edit like any other page. (If it contains a code that you'd don't understand, just leave the code alone.) Section headings used in any display box should be ===Level 3=== headings. Using section headers levels 1 and 2 will mess up the box number count sequence.

Four of the boxes are special: They display different content each time the portal is viewed. These boxes can be maintained with introductions to various articles, biographies, pictures, and quotes.

  • The main CAM portal page contains a separate random number generator for each of these specific boxes. If, for example, the project has written 24 quote pages, then you would set the quote random number generator to 24 (i.e., max=24). A smaller number would also work, but won't display the content of additions that are greater than the respective number.
  • Each new quote page/file should be created sequentially (i.e., /Quotes/24) on the More Quotes... page. Adding additional introductions to selected articles, biographies, and pictures would work essentially the same way.
  • With due care, most editors should be able to correctly maintain these files. See our Open Tasks, below, for additional details.

Open Tasks

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Participants of this project are expected to edit stuff on Wikipedia on their own initiative, unless someone is attempting to organize a group project on our talk pages. A few good places to start would be:

  • Glossary of alternative medicine -- A major list of the terms and concepts used in alternative medicine. Always something to be fine tuned or added to this gateway to CAM articles.
  • Category:Alternative medicine stubs -- You can help Wikipedia by expanding these articles. Then be sure to remove them from the stub category.
  • The abandoned Template:Alternative medical systems series of templates / infoboxes should be adopted by this WikiProject since they have been accepted by the Wikipedian community, to date.
    • Whoever started this series of infoboxes did not complete the task.
      • Some of the sub-category infoboxes were never created.
      • Some of the tagged articles are using the wrong template/box, when another one would be more appropriate.
      • Not all of the branches of alternative medicine articles have been tagged with this template/infobox.
  • Our Wikiproject's Official To Do List of New Topics -- List of Missing Topics that our participants would like to see covered.
  • Maintain our Portal:Complementary and Alternative Medicine
    • There are some 1,000+ CAM related articles, all of which a short introduction can be written for and added to our archive of articles. The introductions should be copied directly from the respective articles, along with the read more hyperlink teaser.
    • Copies of the pictures used to illustrated CAM related articles can be added to our Selected Pictures box.
      • Simply copy the image coding directly from the article. The coding, however, should be changed in order to center the image, before saving it.
    • CAM related quotations can be added to our Quotes box.

Article assessment

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Volunteers for the project may rate articles for quality and completeness. The Wikipedia article rating system uses letter grades to indicate how complete an article is. The first step in this process is to place our Wikiproject banner on the talk page of a CAM article.

Alternative medicine pages by quality
Quality
Total
  FA 2
  FL 1
  GA 25
B 157
C 397
Start 822
Stub 278
List 32
Category 223
Disambig 3
File 6
Project 6
Template 19
NA 223
Assessed 2,194
Unassessed 29
Total 2,223
WikiWork factors (?) ω = 7,887 Ω = 4.69

Core Project Articles

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The following lists/categories are considered important to our WikiProject.

Core Lists

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Every CAM article in Wikipedia needs to be represented in one of these master lists. Otherwise, people may not be able to find our articles.

  1. Glossary of alternative medicine
  2. List of branches of alternative medicine
  3. List of famous people in alternative medicine

Core Categories

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Click on "►" below to display subcategories:
Alternative medicine


  • Search for subpages belonging to this WikiProject
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