Alternative medicine Template‑class

This template is within the scope of WikiProject Alternative medicine, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Alternative medicine related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Alternative medicineWikipedia:WikiProject Alternative medicineTemplate:WikiProject Alternative medicineAlternative medicine articles Template This template does not require a rating on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

We just had a discussion over at Template talk:Alternative medical systems#Osteopathy that culminated with Osteopathy being removed from that template. The main thrust of the argument is that osteopathy makes a bad example for the template because there is no space to cover the nuance of a DO (which is roughly equivalent to an MD) vs. a holistic osteopath (in places where the use of the term is loosely regulated). The same logic would seem to apply here. Would anyone object were I to remove the link? - 2/0 (cont.) 23:30, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Done. - 2/0 (cont.) 23:04, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What should the divisions in this template be?

In classifying alternative medicine, one classification system could be by method of action. An article in Nature proposed these divisions:

1. biological agents
   1. diet
   2. herbs
   3. vitamins
2. energy
   1. Qigong
   2. Reiki
   3. Magnets
3. systems and philosophies
   1. Traditional Chinese medicine
   2. Ayurveda
   3. homeopathy
4. mind/body
   1. spirituality
   2. yoga
   3. mediation
5. body manipulation
   1. Massage
   2. Chiropractic

If we used this system, that could put everything under a broad umbrella and limit the number of divisions we need to make. This system has the benefit of being established by a reliable source, also. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:58, 3 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This is a good start, but the article's authors had a couple of minor oversights. The term "bodywork" should be used to include all hands-on manipulative therapies, including massage, as there are a number of non-massage bodywork modalities. Also, this system is lacking a category for interventions based on movement retraining. A number of related templates already use the NCCAM (NIH's alt med division) categories: {http://nccam.nih.gov/}. They reflect more complete thought than the Nature article categories. --Karinpower (talk) 17:54, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Related discussion. Altanner1991 (talk) 21:14, 19 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]