Thursday, October 13, 2011

Success at SourceWatch!...and a request

I posted just yesterday afternoon about the terrible condition of the Alternative Medicine page at SourceWatch, which had, undetected, come to be a site of woo-promotion and, worst of all, HIV-AIDS denialism. I checked the page this morning and found this:
Alternative medicine refers to alternative approaches to healing and wellness which do not decisively fall within the professional realm of conventional and orthodox (predominately drug and surgery based) medicine. Complementary and Alternative medicine (CAM) is an umbrella term for alternative, complementary and integrative medicine.

Note: This article has been placed under review. Its contents will be preserved on the talk page until that review is completed. ~~
Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy/SourceWatch, left the following message in my comments:
Dear Sir or Madam:

I received this alert about the SourceWatch article discussed above.

Based on your note, I have placed the article under review. Its contents have been re-located to the talk page of the article, pending that review. If you have edits to that page that you would like to make or suggest, while this review is pending, you can make them there.

Without the Google alert, I might not have discovered your criticism of one of the tens of thousands of articles on the site. If you have future suggestions for correction or improvement, please help us in updating the article at issue or alert us to the issue. We are a small ngo with a small staff of editors along with some who volunteer on SourceWatch.

Lisa Graves, the new Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy/SourceWatch
I'm extremely impressed and pleased by the rapid response, which just strengthens my trust in SourceWatch, and regret not having contacted them directly as well.

So I ask for the help of the science-based community in making a better page. I'll be coming up with some ideas for topics that should be covered and references, but I would appreciate any suggestions, or better yet people can make them there directly. Please keep in mind that the audience of SourceWatch tends to be critical of corporate distortions of medicine and medical research, and that a factual presentation of CAM merely requires good science and accurate history, not corporate cheerleading. (In this vein, discussions of CAM as an industry and its political influence are completely appropriate and important information for SourceWatch readers.)

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