M,

I saw that years ago. I am pretty sure I posted it too. If I did not, sorry
for being remiss.

And what is really nice is their forum isn't overrun with B people. And the
only 10 posts on the topic in the last year include:

"Thank you for the reply. I too have tried the alternative medicine after
getting frustrated with conventional medicine and getting no results. I was
told I had to megadose vitamins/supplements the rest of my life and had been
promised healing and a life with out asthma drugs, "brain-washed" into
hating medical doctors and their ways of practicing medicine. But I have
found that I wasted a lot of money on
alternatives(nutritionist/chiropractor, detoxing, megadosing supplements,
buteyko, naet, etc.) only to find deep disappointment and emotional let
down."
ELLENMAILO (ELLENMAIL1)

Finally a group not fending off the alt-med types found in here who haven't
a clue. I may move.

Joy

By "medical research" you seem to mean my "Internet mining" (:- o.

I too had to accept the criticism on the site "asthma about".  Hence
my long tirades here against Buteyko, with the safety aspect as the
chief concern  But the method is now accepted by mainstream Web pages.
The "asthma about" stuff on Buteyko seems to suffer from a complete
lack of empathy and compassion in view of the present situation.
Doesn't this matter?  Makes one wonder about the value of the whole
site. Wholesale adoption of Buteyko with its lack of apparent
rationality and its anti-asthma drug line might be a significant
argument against orthodox asthma treatment as being flawed. across the
board

On the propriety of discussing alternative medicine here, see

"Alternative medicine is finding its niche in nation's hospitals. New
York Times, 13 Apr 2002. Article available online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/13/business/13HOSP.html?tntemail0.

"Memorial Health University Medical Center has ambitious goals for
itself, and executives here hope Deepak Chopra can help achieve them.
In a bid to become a regional leader in health care by combining
traditional and alternative medicine, the hospital has joined with Dr.
Chopra, the best-selling author and holistic health guru, to create a
center where patients and Savannah residents can come for yoga,
meditation or a treatment called Shirodhara in which warm herbalized
sesame oil is dripped languorously onto their foreheads. [For more
information, see http://chopra.memorialhealth.com/default.asp.]

"The embrace of mantras and massage is not limited to Memorial. In
March of last year, St. Joseph's/Candler, Memorial's only rival in
Savannah, opened a Center for Wellbeing, where people can take yoga
classes and learn about aromatherapy. And in May, St. Joseph's will
introduce a program affiliated with the Mind/Body Medical Institute,
founded by Herbert Benson, the Harvard physician who has been at the
forefront of advocating the health benefits of reducing stress.

"Hospitals in search of paying patients and a competitive edge are
increasingly offering their patients some form of alternative
medicine. The number of hospitals offering alternative therapies
nearly doubled from 1998 to 2000, according to a survey by the
American Hospital Association, to 15.5 percent of all hospitals, and
the association says hospitals of all sizes are continuing to open
alternative or complementary medicine centers where patients or local
residents can drop in for a few hours for treatments.

"With a market that has been estimated at around $27 billion and
affluent customers who generally pay full price for these services up
front, hospitals are eager to try alternative medicine. Many see their
forays as an extension of their mission, but ‘it is the money that has
drawn the interest,' said John Weeks, who helped start a foundation to
foster integration between conventional and complementary medicine.

"The programs are offered by community hospitals as well as academic
medical centers like Beth Israel Medical Center and Memorial
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Duke and Stanford, and they
range from relaxation therapies and acupuncture, often given to
patients with serious illness, to treatments more commonly found in
spas . . ."

Guess you just have to go with the times. The bottom line for me is
not that "anything goes" but that many patients' belief in the
seemingly irrational has to be accepted as part of scientific medicine
(with a full understanding of the placebo effect), witness homeopathy
with the scurrilous dilution theory to "potentiate" a medication. The
system seems to work. The fact that for many a scientist the patients
are lost souls because of their indoctrination does not seem so very
important, because the patients do not want to become professors of
medicine. They only need to believe in something. Regards,  Richard
Friedel