Editor—In 1995, journals of alternative medicine published virtually no studies with negative results, which suggests that the literature was far from objective.1 To determine whether the situation has changed we analysed last year's volumes of three journals originally evaluated and compared our results with those from 1995. The journals were Complementary Medicine Research, published since 1994 (six times a year, published in both German and English, with abstracts in both languages); Complementary Therapies in Medicine, published since 1993 (four times a year, published in English); and Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, published since 1995 (six times a year, published in English).
The 207 articles published in 2000 were categorised as positive (a particular intervention is helpful for a particular condition), neutral (no clear conclusion), or negative (intervention is unhelpful). The longitudinal comparison (2000 v 1995) showed that the percentage of negative articles was still minute, at 5% (10/207) in 2000 compared with 1% (1/179) in 1995. The percentage of neutral studies had increased from 44% (78/179) in 1995 to 52% (107/207) in 2000, and the percentage of positive articles had fallen from 56% (100/179) in 1995 to 43% (90/207) in 2000.
These findings imply that bias is still rife but is diminishing. The discipline of alternative medicine may have started its process of maturation, but it still has a long way to go.
References
- 1.Ernst E, Pittler MH. Alternative therapy bias. Nature. 1997;385:480. doi: 10.1038/385480c0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]