Letters

Alternative Healing
In her column titled “Herbal’s Essence” [The Consumer Republic, Dec. 7], Debra Goldman questions the legitimacy of using herbs and other alternative-healing options, likening them to the snake oil of earlier times. She may be interested to know that one-third of American medical schools now offer course work in alternative-healing methodologies, including Yale, Johns Hopkins and Georgetown. The National Institutes of Health now has an Office of Alternative Medicine, and Harvard holds regular symposia around the country on different alternative-healing subjects.
She questions soy proteins and isoflavones, calling them “psuedo-scientific blather” and asking, “Who cares?”
All of us ought to.