It was with trepidation that I accepted the brief to try to pick a few good sites from the multitude that I knew must be out there. In fact, an AltaVista search on “complementary medicine” yielded only about 20 000 hits—not many by the standards of the modern web, but still far too many to be searchable. Google (www.google.com), now out of beta but working as well as ever, comes to the rescue. It returns keyword based searches ranked by the number of links to a site, which is a good measure of the site’s importance. Its top pick is the US government’s National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which is one of those sites that is so well organised that it can be difficult to find the content. However, nccam.nih.gov/nccam/what-is-cam/ is a good place to start, with guidance for those considering adopting alternative or complementary therapies.
At www.healthy.net/clinic/therapy/index.asp the Alternative and Complementary Medicine Centre has a workable database that allows searches for practitioners in each field. As ever, the picks are US dominated, but the search is truly international and could be useful for residents of most English speaking countries, although there is only as much information about each practitioner as you might find in a telephone book.
This, of course, is the key point. How can you judge whether the standards of practice are safe and effective? The answer is that, as for conventional medicine on the web, you generally can’t. Private practitioners need self promotion, and the largely small scale of alternative practices means that there are a plethora of small scale websites with little good quality content.