Alternative medicine has renewed its growing public interest in recent times due to inequality of patients and healthcare professionals’ ratios with increased workload for the latter, various side effects of modern medicine, lack of complete remission from chronic diseases, high cost of new drugs, and emerging new diseases. Hence, people have become more dependent on treatment systems replying on alternative medicine or herbal medicine from traditional medicinal practitioners. Alternative medicine has grown substantially over time and encompasses several millennia of therapeutic systems. The significant areas of alternative medicine include mind–body therapies, body manipulation, and the therapies based on biological systems. Natural products based biological treatment is the most popular of them as nature has endowed us with abundance of effective pharmacologically active phytochemicals. These phytochemicals possess numerous specific clinical health benefits including antioxidant, antidiabetic, anti-inflammatory, anticancer, anti-infectious and analgesic effects. In addition, alternative medicine is easily accessible, affordable, most often noninvasive, and provides favorable benefits during terminal periods of some diseases. However, due to the lack of well-designed clinical trials, the safety and effectiveness of many alternative medicines/therapies remains elusive. This chapter will critically discuss major areas, uses, safety and regulation, current challenges & future perspectives of alternative medicine.

This paper is an investigation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funding trends within America's research-active tenured and tenure-track, civil engineering community from 50 major, doctoral-granting institutions, with 5 schools examined in detail. Important questions are raised as to how funding patterns relate to rank and sub-discipline within Civil Engineering, and whether there is a causal link with publication rates. The paper presents key parameters with respect to issues that may be critical for tenure decisions at some institutions. They include total average number of awards per individual, the size of those awards normalized by named participant, and how these values have changed over the past nearly 40 years. These issues are considered for Geotechnical Engineering in comparison to other sub-disciplines within Civil Engineering. Funding breakdowns shows a higher reliance of Geotechnical engineers on traditional funding programs within NSF with a profoundly greater capacity to raise money at more senior levels, although these additional resources do not necessarily translate into increased journal publication rates.