Integrating Therapeutic and Complementary Nutrition (Electronic book text)

Consumers look to health professionals for guidance on how to integrate complementary and alternative (CAM) therapies into their lifestyles, yet most health care professionals are trained only in conventional practices. Integrating Therapeutic and Complementary Nutrition provides the scientific foundation necessary to understand CAM nutrition practices and how they are being integrated into conventional care. Working within a framework that examines complementary and alternative therapies alongside conventional nutrition practice, the authors examine controversial issues surrounding CAM practice. Integrating Therapeutic and Complementary Nutrition replaces popular myths with fact based and verifiable information from nutritionists, professors, researchers, and industry professionals. Each chapter describes in detail the underlying process involved in both healthy function and dysfunction of each organ system and disease state to provide the necessary background for the comparison, contrast, and conjunction of conventional and alternative therapy. Paying particular attention to determining which therapies might be appropriate for which conditions, including which supplements, in what amounts and from which manufacturers, this book uses scientific data, considered opinions and case studies to weed out the beneficial from the harmful. While aware that there unanswered questions exist, the editors provide a much needed reference to the information currently available, clearing the confusion between what is known and what is not; what is proven and what is, though well-intentioned, just wishful thinking.