How to Keep Up with Complementary and Alternative Medical Advances

Keeping up with complementary and alternative medical advances is an enormous task for all complementary and alternative medical practitioners.

Studies estimate the number of journals dealing with primary care to be over 300 and the number of articles to be over 7,000 per month!

How can complementary and alternative medical practitioners stay ahead of complementary and alternative medical advances? Though growing in awareness and popularity throughout the international community, complementary and alternative medicine has no central governing body or reporting service. Complementary and alternative medical advances are published everyday but they are dispersed throughout mainstream and alternative journals.

In order to keep up with complementary and alternative medical advances you will need an organized method of scanning the literature.

Here are six tips to keep up with literature covering complementary and alternative medical advances:

1. Focus on journals that are pertinent to your profession, area of practice and patient demographic. For example, if your practice is primarily focused on women, select journals that are women centered and scan those first.
2. Choose one or two general medical journals with a solid reputation for documenting medical advances and scan them.
3. Watch for journals that offer a medical advances section, which will allow you to scan study citations of interest in one concise area.
4. Scan articles for quality. A quick way to do this is to look at the methods section. See what kind of study it is, how many subjects there were and if it was conducted on your patient demographic. Check if the studies are epidemiological. Studies involving animals or tissue cultures, although interesting, are not easily applied in practice.
5. Look at journal reviews. These concise reports gather studies about one subject, rate the studies according to quality and report the results. These reviews will offer you a quick way of knowing what is in the literature without having to search for it. The Cochrane Collaboration: Cochrane Reviews houses an enormous library of online reviews.
6. Expand your journal selection. Add one or two journals that focus on complementary and alternative medicine advances that focus on your specialty and perhaps even sub-specialty.

You will find important, relevant studies concerning complementary and alternative medical advances from a variety sources including mainstream journals.

Complementary and alternative medical advances happen every day. You will need a strategy in order to keep up. Once your strategy is in place you can continuously reevaluate the journals you have chosen to focus on the ones that consistently offer the greatest relevance and value.