Complementary Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine

256 Alternative Cardiovascular Medicine
begun to be gathered. In reality, conventional medicine and alternative
and complementary therapies run parallel rather than in concert.
The situation is compounded by the speed of new information transfer
and the contradictions of breaking research. Physicians can no longer
rely on a conventional wisdom, imparted from their medical training and
specialty knowledge and updated through conferences and current literature.
The issues concerning information dissemination, even within
conventional medicine, are illustrated by the decision in July 2002 to halt
the Women’s Health Initiative prevention trial when the preliminary
findings demonstrated that the risks of taking estrogen plus progestin
hormone therapy may outweigh the benefits. Professionals and consumers
were largely convinced that hormone replacement therapy (HRT)
would help prevent serious health problems, including heart disease in
postmenopausal women. This had become the accepted position, transmitted
through apparently authoritative sources that had assessed the
available data.
Previous chapters have been concerned with systematically reviewing
the current research data available on various CAM therapies used
as adjuncts or alternatives to conventional care for cardiovascular disease
(CVD). Even during the publication of this volume, new research
findings will become available. This chapter provides categorized reference
resources on the World Wide Web to aid the busy physician and
other members of the health care team in updating that knowledge.
However, Web-based resources are notoriously volatile, so the main
rationale in this chapter is to provide guidelines and principles that can
be used to find, assess, and cross-check information on the World Wide
Web, both for professionals’ use and for their use with patients.
GUIDELINES FOR EVALUATING CAM INFORMATION
RESOURCES ON THE WEB
Despite recognized problems of exploitation and commercialism and
deliberate misinformation that are present anyway in all walks of life,
the Web is still an excellent information resource for professionals and
the public. Many assessment tools have been developed to quality-evaluate
Web resources. Many of these have been of short duration, were
sometimes provided by an organization with vested interests, could be
faked, or relied on voluntary compliance, such as the HONcode, the most
widely known and respected code, developed by the Geneva-based
Health On the Net Foundation. You can verify the authenticity of any site
displaying the code by going to the HON code website at http://
www.hon.ch/HONcode/Conduct.html.