Article history: Received 2 March 2009 Received in revised form 23 June 2009 Accepted 27 July 2009

Ancient medical systems are still prevalent in Sikkim, popularly nurtured by Buddhist groups using the traditional Tibetan pharmacopoeia overlapping with Ayurvedic medicine. Traditional medical practices and their associated cultural values are based round Sikkim's three major communities, Lepcha, Bhutia and Nepalis. In this study, a semi-structured questionnaire was prepared for folk healers c...

Background. This study investigates the prevalence of and factors associated with users of folk therapy in Taiwan. Methods. Using data from the 2005 National Health Interview Survey and the National Health Insurance Research Database, we identified 16,750 adults aged 20 years and older. Sociodemographic factors, lifestyle, medical utilization, and health behaviors were compared between people u...

BACKGROUND We report a survey of the content of obsessions in children with autism spectrum conditions. We use the term 'obsessions' narrowly, to indicate strong, repetitive interests. We predicted that obsessions would not cluster randomly, but rather would occur significantly more often in the domain of 'folk physics' (an interest in how things work), and significantly less often in the domai...

PURPOSE We developed an adverse events (AEs) reporting form for Korean folk medicine. METHODS The first version of the form was developed and tested in the clinical setting for spontaneous reporting of AEs. Additional revisions to the reporting form were made based on collected data and expert input. RESULTS We developed an AEs reporting form for Korean folk medicine. The items of this form...

As folk songs live largely through oral transmission, there usually is no standard form of a song each performance of a folk song may be unique. Different interpretations of the same song are called song variants, all variants of a song belong to the same variant type. In the paper, we explore how various melody-based features relate to folk song variants. Specifically, we explore whether we ca...