Complementary Medicine Research: It Is Never Too Late for the Future

When the founding fathers and mothers of our journal consulted – nearly a quarter of a century ago – about the plans of establishing a new journal with the scope of research in complementary medicine, the field was young in Germany and elsewhere. Dieter Melchart, one of the founders of the journal, had established the Münchner Modell only a few years ago, and I had just finished my PhD thesis. At that time, Markus Wiesenauer had research projects going on in Ulm, and Detlev Thilo-Körner had started his work in Gießen. Peter Matthiessen and his group had just mapped the field of potential interest in researching complementary medicine in Germany for the German government and found some 100 individuals and groups that expressed such interest, should funding become available [1]. As it happened, funding was granted for 2 rather small programs, the second of which was terminated prematurely. Additionally, the Karl und Veronica CarstensFoundation had just taken up its work and was starting to bring interested researchers together, to fund and seed research, and to enable a new research culture [2]. In Berlin, the chair of naturopathy, given to Malte Bühring, was being installed. When some researchers met in Basel, in the late Steven Karger’s office, to discuss the potential for a new scholarly outlet, a few issues soon became clear: there would be enough interest within the research community, both for reading and for publishing research in the emerging field of complementary medicine in Germany; there would be enough groups wanting to publish and not finding sufficient openness in traditional journals; and there would certainly also be an educated audience, initially mainly the members of the Swiss Society for Medicinal Phytotherapy (SMGP) – to whom we are grateful for their continued interest and support –, but increasingly also libraries and other interested individuals. So the founders discussed not only whether such a journal should be launched. The latter question was settled rather soon, especially because Steven Karger took the far-reaching and also far-sighted entrepreneurial decision to support such a journal in its initial years with his portfolio of other and stronger medical publications in the mainstream of biomedicine. But the discussion around the title and the language went hot. I was a vigorous supporter, then and now, of an English-language journal, including the title. My argument was simple: as Latin was the Lingua franca of all scholars in medieval Europe, whether they came from Denmark or from Portugal, so is English the Lingua franca of modern-day science, with an increasingly international, globalized culture of research. A Germanlanguage journal will only become a niche publication, with little international outreach. I experienced many funny streaks in my life, and some of them are funny-tragic. This is one of them: my ideas come roughly 2 to 3 decades too early. I was outvoted, and the new journal was given a German title, to inform and serve a mainly German readership. Shortly afterwards, the Office of Alternative Medicine was founded at the National Institutes of Health [3]. And suddenly, the USA emerged as a potential player and huge Published online: February 15, 2017