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Complementary and alternative therapiesThere has long been debate about the degree to which conventional health professionals should work closely with complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, if patients choose treatment from both. Some doctors are trained in conventional and alternative therapies but often, liaison depends on the type of therapy, whether it is regulated by law and whether it supplements conventional methods of diagnosis and treatment or claims to provide an alternative to them. Among the therapies often used by patients to (...) supplement conventional medicine, but which do not claim to have a diagnostic purpose, are aromatherapy, massage, stress therapy, reflexology and hypnotherapy. Chinese medicine and homoeopathy are among those which are not statutorily regulated but claim to provide diagnosis and treatment. Practitioners of conventional medicine are often wary of unregulated treatments that supplant evidence-based therapy—even though not all conventional medicine has been proven by randomised controlled trials.The role of complementary and alternative therapies came under scrutiny in England in February 2010 when the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee published a critical report on NHS funding for homoeopathy. 1 Focusing on whether government policy on homoeopathy was evidence-based, the Committee found a mismatch between the evidence and policy. Its main conclusion was that the evidence indicates that homoeopathy is not efficacious and does not produce results beyond the placebo effect. The Committee said that explanations for why homoeopathy was thought to work were implausible and that further homoeopathic clinical trials could not be justified. The amount that the NHS actually spends on homoeopathic therapies was left unclear and was subject to varying claims from the Society of Homoeopaths and the Health Minister.2 The Parliamentary report recommended that there should be a clear policy on prescribing placebos, including homoeopathic medicines, but the government has been …. (shrink)

The majority of the world’s population now lives an urban existence, spending as much as 95% of their lives indoors. The olfactory atmosphere in the built environment has been shown to exert a profound, if often unrecognized, influence over our mood and well-being. While the traditionally malodorous stench to be found indoors (i.e., prior to the invention of modern sanitation) has largely been eliminated in recent centuries, many of the outbreaks of sick-building syndrome that have been reported over the last (...) half century have been linked to the presence of a strange smell in the environment. At the same time, however, there is also growing evidence that consumer behavior can be manipulated by the presence of pleasant ambient odors, while various aromatherapy scents are said to improve our mood and well-being. This Anglophone review focuses primarily on indoor western urban developed spaces. Importantly, the olfactory ambience constitutes but one component of the multisensory atmosphere and ambient odors interact with the visual, auditory, and haptic aspects of the built environment. Surprisingly, the majority of published studies that have deliberately chosen to combine ambient scent with other sensory interventions, such as, for example, music, have failed to increase store sales, or to enhance people’s mood and/or well-being, as might have been expected. Such negative findings therefore stress the importance of considering multisensory congruency while, at the same time, also highlighting the potential dangers that may be associated with sensory overload when thinking about the effect of ambient smell on our well-being. (shrink)