As a matter of fact…

With this issue, FACT is one year old - an appropriate time for reflection and some exploration into what FACT is or wants to be.

FACT was launched in December 1996 at the 3rd Annual Symposium on Complementary Health Care, held in Exeter, UK. The first issue was handed out to all delegates at the symposium; hundreds of other complimentary copies were sent out to potential subscribers. FACT has now built up a sizeable subscriber base, and the FACT team would like to express their thanks for the support that all our readers have given the journal in its important first year.

The first issue of FACT included a brief questionnaire asking readers how useful they thought the various sections were, and what other features people might like to see in FACT. The survey elicited an encouraging response: the results indicated that there is a definite need for FACT, and the summary/commentaries (hereafter known as summentaries) in particular were thought to be very useful. The questionnaire findings are summarised on page 149. Many respondents made useful suggestions, some of which have been taken on board. Inside this issue is another similar questionnaire that we would like to encourage you to complete - it is important to us to know what our readership thinks of FACT, if it has improved since the first issue, and how you think it could be improved further.

So what is FACT all about? It is about searching for the truth, or as close to the truth as is possible. Yet the truth is sometimes uncomfortable. FACT has been accused once or twice of bias in concentrating on negative studies - as if we had some interest in stopping the advance of complementary medicine! The fact about FACT is that in its first year, FACT has reported 35 negative studies, 40 positive studies and 31 with equivocal results. FACT has also identified 11 cases (from the 106 papers referred to above) where the author’s favorable conclusions were not justified by the findings. Unjustified claims, we believe, are against patients’ interests, they damage the cause of complementary medicine, and they most certainly are not facts!

A fact is a truth, but delving into the meanings of words with the prefix fact, one might be surprised to learn that a faction of such words mean anything but truth. Something that is factitious is ‘not genuine’, ‘sham’, or ‘artificial rather than natural’; a factoid is ‘a piece of unreliable information that is believed to be true because of the way it is represented or repeated in print’. As factotums working here at the factory, we aim to sift out the factitious from the factual, and the factoids from the facts, to give you accurate summentaries of key papers in the published literature on complementary therapies.

We hope that you will choose to receive FACT throughout 1998, and that you will show FACT to your colleagues and friends. We will continue with our approach to presenting the research evidence on complementary medicine in an impartial and analytical manner - and that’s a fact!