A Systematic Approach to Alternative Medical Procedures

Abstract

from the medical literature to provide a value-added treatment. My collaborators and I then extended LRD to Parkinson’s disease (PD), multiple sclerosis (MS), and cataracts (Kostoff 2008), incurable, degenerative diseases that are treated in many different ways to differing effects. For each medical condition, we read all the recent reviews of the disease published in respected medical journals, as well as online reviews of the disease and treatment options generated by major medical clinics. We then examined the medical literature for alternative approaches to treating or preventing the disease. We generated two types of results. The first encompassed substances and behaviors that had been demonstrated to have a positive therapeutic or preventative impact on patients with the disease of interest; we labeled these “potential innovations.” The second category comprised substances and behaviors that may have a positive therapeutic or preventative impact; we learned of these substances and behaviors by directly or indirectly linking previously disjoint literatures. We called these “potential discovery candidates.” Before we published our findings on potential discoveries, we vetted them against major databases (Science Citation Index, Medline, Patents Index) to ensure that these linkages had not been published previously.