The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 279 No 7464 p159
11 August 2007

Great little book on complementary and alternative medicines

‘Complementary medicine: a guide for pharmacists’, by Denise Rankin-Box and Elizabeth M. Williamson. Pp xxi+292. Price £14.99. Oxford: Churchill Livingstone Elsevier; 2006. ISBN 0 443 07028 8

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is arguably the most important part of modern pharmacognosy and an increasingly important component of pharmacy, therefore a user-friendly text is extremely timely. This text is informative, easy to read, contains easy-to-learn sections for students and is reasonably priced.

This book, the same size as the old-style BNF, is presumably designed to fit easily into most pockets, enabling it to be read immediately before counter prescribing or consultations. I predict that this text will also become essential reading for undergraduate CAM courses.

The book gives a detailed explanation of an extremely wide range of complementary therapies as well as systems of CAM employing medicinal products, including a concise explanation of the legal status of the different types of CAM. Concepts, such as placebo and nocebo effects, are explained and illustrated with examples.

The text gives a factual and unbiased coverage of the subject area, highlighting both positive and negative examples of practice, for instance, the existence of epidemiological and clinical evidence to substantiate the use of particular remedies and the issue of poor quality of some available products, respectively.

The book comprises a detailed description and philosophy of a wide range of schemes of CAM, including popular examples from other countries, eg, ayurvedic, traditional Chinese and anthroposophical medicine. Large amounts of concise tabulated data on applications, doses and drug interactions of popular medicine-based therapies are presented.

The history and applications of homoeopathic and aromatherapy products are also detailed. A wide range of physical, emotional and psychological remedies are also described. The text also contains a detailed glossary of types of CAM and a useful index.

A large amount of information is compressed into numerous tables and boxes. The quality of production is high; I spotted only one typesetting error and I could find no reference to Appendix 4.

In conclusion, this great little book is keenly priced for both undergraduates and practising pharmacists, it is written by authoritative authors who have published widely in the area and it is definitely not to be compared with a plethora of similarly priced books available to the general public.


Brian Lockwood
(senior lecturer and director of Pharmaceutical Industrial Advanced Training at the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Manchester)