As we are poised on the brink of moving into the new year 2013, this Issue 202 of Positive Health PH Online similarly bridges many of the gaps which certain forces believe to separate complementary / alternative medicine from conventional / orthodox healthcare. As long time, devoted readers of PH Online realize, I do not subscribe to the notion that various techniques / disciplines of healthcare constitute separate worldviews of medicine. I have long been an advocate of the vision that healthcare is multi-faceted and that there are a multitude of various disciplines and techniques, practised by different practitioners. Hence, I don’t see the sense of considering that osteopathic practitioners are alternative, but that physiotherapists are conventional, or that nutritionists are alternative but dieticians are orthodox.

No matter how many years I have been Editor of Positive Health PH Online - about 19 years and 201 issues - there is nothing that brings home more clearly the stark reality of illness, particularly cancer, than when people I know and have been helping to locate research or physicians, inform me that their or their loved one’s prognosis is now ‘terminal’.