| Product: |
Here's Health |
| Date: |
24/06/01 (529 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Good healthy living info
Disadvantages: Heavily biased towards alternative/complementary therapies often at the expense of mainstream medical options that are safe and effective
Here's Health is a magazine I used to really like until I did my degree... maybe I have sold out to the "the mainstream" medical sciences...
Allow me to explain why this magazine has fallen in my estimation...
Firstly let me say overall I think Here's Health IS a good magazine that DOES promote healthy lifestyles.
However I have my axe to grind with them in that it is a heavily biased magazine promoting alternative therapies with abundant gusto but often being negative or presenting the mainstream medical option as not being quite as effective.
The magazine relies heavily on anecdotal reports that are not vetted for confounding factors such as placebo effects, other therapies used in conjunction etc. In any scientific publication anecdotal reports are acknowledged to be the poorest source of evidence as they are not controlled for confounding factors. Case reports are published in scientific literature for really rare conditions, drug interactions etc. where it would not be practical to carry out a case controlled study due to the rarity of the condition.
Furthermore a lot of the authors are biased in their approaches to articles. While they try to present an article as being a well balanced "pros vs. cons" style the fact they are biased in one direction means they consciously or sub-consciously place greater emphasis on their point of view... Scientific papers in reputable journals, before being published are subjected to independent review by experts in the field to make sure they aren't biased and the research methods are sound.
Why buy Here's Health than?
Here's Health plays a very important role in distilling scientific information and presenting it to the public at large. As long as you keep in mind that it is at its very core a magazine for alternative/complementary therapies and is biased towards these therapies. However it does give a lot of good information
on healthy living.
SO buy it... but take what it says on some issues with a pinch of salt...
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