(ISSN 2573-4393)
OBM Integrative and Complementary Medicine is an international peer-reviewed Open Access journal published quarterly online by LIDSEN Publishing Inc. It covers all evidence-based scientific studies on integrative, alternative and complementary approaches to improving health and wellness.
Topics contain but are not limited to:
The journal publishes a variety of article types: Original Research, Review, Communication, Opinion, Comment, Conference Report, Technical Note, Book Review, etc.
There is no restriction on paper length, provided that the text is concise and comprehensive. Authors should present their results in as much detail as possible, as reviewers are encouraged to emphasize scientific rigor and reproducibility.
Publication Speed (median values for papers published in 2023): Submission to First Decision: 5.9 weeks; Submission to Acceptance: 14.7 weeks; Acceptance to Publication: 8 days (1-2 days of FREE language polishing included)
Special Issue
Complementary Medicine and Local Public Health Reorganization
Submission Deadline: December 31, 2022 (Open) Submit Now
Guest Editor
Jack Warren Salmon, PhD, Professor
School of Public Health, College of Pharmacy, School of Urban Planning and Public Affairs,
The University of Illinois, Chicago, USA (Retired)
Research interests: the corporatization of medicine and pharmacy; managed care pharmacy; urban health care delivery; comparative health care systems; global pharmaceutical industry developments; alternative and complementary medicines; selected health policy issues.
About This Topic
A wide variety of popular complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies can be found and are accepted across the globe today. Since the United States (U.S) Congress created the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), studies to evaluate the safety, effectiveness, and use of CAM therapies have been published in dozens of medical journals and in the U.S. NIH's PubMed listing, indicating the up to 1500 published studies annually being cited in the PubMed listing. Because of its prevalence and the resurgence of demand for new and age-old therapies, it is critical to understand CAM use during the COVID-19 pandemic (Paudyal et al., 2022).
The rise of the COVID-SARS-19 disrupted many nation's economies and their respective health care systems. As people have witnessed and endured the scourge of this pandemic, new doubts have arisen about Western medicine and science, as conventional health care systems across the world are imploding. Even in the U.S., local health systems were unable to address the onslaught of victims of the coronavirus and are being forced to make huge changes.
As a global community, people are searching for greater hope and wanting to find what among CAM modalities possibly can alleviate symptoms, prevent, and treat COVID-19 and other ailments where Western medicine has demonstrated incomplete effectiveness. It is interesting to see the resurrection of what most people on the globe must actually rely upon due to its high costs, with little access and availability to Western medicine. For years, diverse communities around the world have used CAM to prevent and treat acute and chronic illnesses. Their preferences lay in the realm of non-Western medicine, along with Northern nations’ citizens, who increasingly choose from the panoply of traditional and newer therapeutic pursuits (Salmon, 1984). The costs of conventional prevention and treatment of COVID-19 stretches beyond the reach of most people in the Southern Hemisphere, and medical costs even burden many Americans. Faced with the vaccine nationalism of the Great Powers, who collectively have failed to collaborate to devise effective global strategies to alleviate the viral spread. Given current geopolitics, governments have not come together for much international collaboration to rid COVID-19 across all nations.
Thus, it is imperative now to increase research into CAM for COVID-19. Traditional medicines at this time may be ready to offer therapeutic modalities that may alleviate some suffering, as many newly published studies are suggesting (Salmon, 2022). The WHO has recently established a research center for Traditional Medicine in India to harness the potential of traditional medicines (WHO, 2022).
What now appears critically necessary are reconceptualization of “health”, “wellness” “prevention” and even “medicine” itself. Much needed are greater formal studies of various complementary and alternative modalities, along with social scientists’ exploring the dynamics of preferences and performance in the actual use of these therapies by various peoples. As mentioned above in terms of the PubMed’s huge listings of ongoing studies, findings among different patient cohorts should consider complementary therapies to substitute for unsafe and ineffective conventional medical interventions within current health care systems. Such a social learning curve across many national health systems needs to be better understood so that new achievements can be made.
Clearly COVID has shown that modern medical science and social epidemiological studies must advance more rapidly for disease control. Will the COVID-19 pandemic
spur a new era for a reorientation to human health and healing toward a collective quest of health? Let’s hope and work for it.
This Special Journal issue on Complementary Medicine and Local Public Health
Reorganization seeks to explore some of the interstices between conventional health care systems and the resurgence of complementary and alternative medicines. Since the bulk of the human population have come to inhabit cities, it is not clear that our urban centers remain best prepared to address the new social disease onslaughts within new collectivities of population groups.
Most regrettably the Southern Hemisphere nations are being left far behind in COVID vaccination distribution, which has become greatly marred by the vaccine nationalism of multinational pharmaceutical companies within the Great Powers, including US, UK, Germany, China, India, that prevent other nations from manufacturing “knock-off” vaccines for their citizenry. The unvaccinated across the world pose the added danger of further mutations within various impoverished and malnutritional groups with poor access to medical care. The coronavirus may likely continue to yield new variants while the current vaccines fail to keep up.
Are there comprehensive strategies for wellness in populations that can help contain and/or slow the spread of the COVID-19 bedsides diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS, among other endemic scourges? Can new societal undertakings prepare for potential future social epidemics thru zoonotic causations? Understanding social causation is key for future health planning.
References
Paudyal, V. et al (2022). Complementary and alternative medicines use in COVID-19: A global perspective on practice, policy, and research. Research in Social and Administrative Pharmacy 18(2524-2528).
Salmon, J. W. (2022, forthcoming). Alternative Medicines: Popular and Policy Perspectives London: Routledge).
World Health Organization (2022). WHO establishes the Global Centre for Traditional Medicine in India. Available from: who.int/initiatives/who.global-centre-for-traditional-medicines
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted through the LIDSEN Submission System. Detailed information on manuscript preparation and submission is available in the Instructions for Authors. All submitted articles will be thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process and will be processed following the Editorial Process and Quality Control policy. Upon acceptance, the article will be immediately published in a regular issue of the journal and will be listed together on the special issue website, with a label that the article belongs to the Special Issue. LIDSEN distributes articles under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) License in an open-access model. The authors own the copyright to the article, and the article can be free to access, distribute, and reuse provided that the original work is correctly cited.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). Research articles and review articles are highly invited. Authors are encouraged to send the tentative title and abstract of the planned paper to the Editorial Office (icm@lidsen.com) for record. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Editorial Office.
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Vidhi is a Clinical yoga therapist; mentor for yoga therapy training in Krishnamacharya tradition. She holds a MSc in Public health from Kings College London.
Mirela Olympia Fagarasan Palmer
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Zhong-Ting (Justin) is a PhD student from Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He holds BSc in Applied Chemistry and MSc in Environmental Engineering. He was a R&D researcher of NanoMaterials Technology Pte Ltd in Singapore (2006-2012). His current research interests are functional nanomaterials synthesis & design, and their application into environmental/chemical engineering. He has published near 60 SCI papers in Applied Catalysis B, Chemical Engineering Journal and so on with H-Index 23. He also serviced as reviewers over 40 Journals such as Appl. Catal. B, Water Research, Chem. Eng. J, ACS Applied Materials & Interface, etc. He was honored such as “The Bsic Research Achievment 1st Award of CIESC”, “The ZJUT Fund Breeding Distinguished Young Scholars” etc.
Rolf Teschke studied Medicine in Munich and Marburg, where he finished his MD thesis before starting a residency at the Department of Pathology, University of Marburg. Subsequently and with a fellowship of the Deutsche Forschungsgmeinschaft, he worked at the Bronx VA Hospital/Mount Sinai Hospital in New York during 1972–1975 together with Professor Charles S. Lieber and successfully isolated MEOS and expanded its characterization. Back in Germany, he was at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf with a focus on alcoholic liver disease, biochemical drug studies, and clinical intoxications by halogenated aliphatic hydrocarbons, where he became a Professor of Medicine. In 1987, he was offered a chief position and appointed as Director of the Medical Department II, City Hospital Hanau, Teaching Hospital of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt/Main. His clinical and research interests are on liver injury by drugs and herbs including causality assessment by RUCAM in close association with Dr. Gaby Danan in Paris. A perfect cooperation exists also with Professor Tran Dang Xuan of the University of Hiroshima, Japan. Finally, he is the author of more than 275 publications including books and book chapters, and he is editor in chief of scientific journals and member of editorial boards.