Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought this book expecting to see a quick summary of natural remedies per condition. Like a bullet point outline of how each of them would help patients to control their condition. Something like a `materia medica' of natural remedies. So if you have, say sore throat or suffer from gout you can quickly find a link to remedies. After all, the authors managed to pack 400 conditions into a 700 page book, it looks promising, right? Wrong. This books fails miserably. Let me have a close look at its structure and content. STRUCTURE Each of about 400 sections consists of roughly equal three parts. Part 1: General description of the condition. Most of what I scanned through is too general to get anything useful of this. Opening a Wikipedia page will give you a better idea if you do not know what e.g. uterine fibroids are. So taking into account that this ½ pager is dedicated to describing a condition, how does it make you feel when the authors waste it with a generic copy and paste like: "It is estimated that 20 to 50 percent of women of reproductive age have fibroids, although not all diagnosed. In more than 99 percent of fibroid cases, the tumors are benign; they are not associated with cancer and do not increase a woman's risk for uterine cancer. For reasons not yet understood, they tend to form during a woman's late thirties and early forties, and then shrink after menopause. This would seem to suggest that estrogen is involved in the process. However, while all women produce estrogen, only some develop fibroid tumors." (p.433) Remember the space is golden here. And this empty discussion of irrelevant epidemiology and other irrelevant to this volume points just carries on like a page filler. There's no clear list of common etiologies that are currently proposed, there's no relevance to what follows in the next two half pagers. It feels to me that the authors just copied and pasted sections of textbooks or internet without considerations of relevance, priorities, and objectives. Part 2: List of Nutrients. Let's open a section on arthritis (p. 217) and find a 3 page list of 44 [sic] nutrients from Vitamin C to Cell Guard from Biotec Foods [sic]. Seriously?! If the authors thought that the purpose of their work is to pack every vitamin, mineral and other bio-active supplement - they probably succeeded, but in every other aspect you failed. Another unacceptable and highly unethical feature of this book I have seen only in laymen product-pushing "medical" literature is direct advertising. So with no shame we are recommended "EPA from Carison Labs", "Cell Guard from Biotec Foods", or "Amino Balance from Anabol Naturals". I felt like popping up in a virtual health store and being pushed a few thousand dollars worth of stuff without any clear reason or even idea of their efficacy. Part 3: Herbs/Recommendations/Considerations (in free text form). Here you will see pointless regurgitation of generic claims you can find online, like in the same RA section: "eat more sulphur-containing foods, such as asparagus, eggs, garlic and onions." (p. 221). Really? That's a natural remedy for a debilitating condition that RA is? What is so infuriating about this particular example with RA is that it's been well documented in the scientific literature that RA has proven exogenous etiologies. You can see this advice on even non-clinical, common laymen web pages as recommendations to avoid certain proteins such as gluten or casein. Now, this volume is absolutely mute about this. Nothing. Not a hint. Dangerous and careless. ALTERNATIVES. To get a sense what a good encyclopaedic source on natural remedies might look like, let me turn to "Textbook of Natural Medicine by Pizzorno, 4th ed" written by a group of researchers. If I open a section on RA, I can immediately see that "the elimination of reactive foods has been shown to offer significant benefit to some individuals with RA" (p.1774). It also lists the foods which are most common triggers of RA, including wheat (54%), dairy (37%), rye (3%) and malt (27%). The references to scientific literature is given which for RA lists 236 original peer reviewed articles. What about "Prescription for Nutritional Healing"? Nothing. Only generic, inaccurate, incomplete, superficial snippets. The list of bad advice goes on, just to list a few I flicked through where the problems are as bad: neuropathies, diabetes, CVD, sleep disturbance, thyroid diseases, metal toxicities. I scratched only the surface here, but that was enough for me to make a conclusion about this book. VERDICT: This is a very dangerous book for laymen in medical research. It contains very poor scholarship, superficial or factually incorrect claims, large grave omissions, plain inaccuracies and outdated information. This books gives a bad reputation to natural remedies which can and do help in many cases of chronic and acute human conditions. Avoid it. This will not make you feel better, and in the worst case scenario will make you more ill. If you are sick there's no point of wasting your precious time on a useless book which apparently sold copies to 3 million duped readers.