Work

Development and classification of an operational definition of complementary and alternative medicine for the Cochrane collaboration.

Year: 2011

Type: article

Abstract: During the past decade, the Cochrane Collaboration has been an increasingly important source of information on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies. From 2007 to 2008, the Cochrane CAM Field developed a topics list that allowed us to categorize all 396 Cochrane reviews related to CAM (as of The Cochrane Library, Issue 4, 2009). This topics list is an advance in making Cochrane reviews on CAM topics accessible to the public. In this article, we discuss challenges in developing the topics list, including developing an operational efinition of CAM, deciding which reviews should be included within the CAM Field's scope, developing the structured list of CAM Field-specific topics, and determining where in the topics list the reviews should be placed. Although aspects of our operational definition of CAM are open to revision, a standardized definition provides us with an objective, reproducible, and systematic method for defining and classifying CAM therapies.

Source: PubMed

Authors: L Susan Wieland, Eric Manheimer, Brian M Berman

Institution: University of Maryland, Baltimore

Language: English

Topic: Complementary and Alternative Medicine Studies

Subfield: Complementary and alternative medicine

Field: Medicine

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institutes of Health

Award: Cochrane Complementary Medicine Field: Resource for Research