The same alternative-medicine treatment that makes your doctor frown might also make you feel better. We're not all sold on the value of conventional medicine, with the doctors and the drugstores and the stethoscopes and all that. Even if we are, people have received benefits from treatments conventional medicine did not provide. Former New York Times reporter Melanie Warner takes a tour of alternative medicine from many angles, in her book The Magic Feather Effect: The Science of Alternative

The acronym SNYP makes a bit more sense when you find it stands for Spay/Neuter Your Pet . It's been giving out inexpensive vouchers for people to get birth control surgery for their cats and dogs for years now. But issues developed with the system, and SNYP chose to open its own low-cost spay/neuter clinic in Talent, with the doors expected to open in February. It was not an easy decision, reports SNYP board president Sally Mackler.

If you've ever been to an eye doctor and got quizzed about the kind of coating you'd like on your glasses, you've got the beginning of an understanding of what Quantum Innovations in Central Point does. But lens coating is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Quantum founder Norm Kester is the guest on this month's edition of our business segment, The Ground Floor.

We go to the doctor because we want to know what's wrong with us, and get it fixed. The doctor can usually figure it out... unless she can't. MDs and other medical pros are humans, not gods. And the difficulty of figuring out what's what is exemplified by the title of Dr. Steven Hatch's book: Snowball in a Blizzard . He teaches at a medical school and urges doctors to admit that they are stumped, if and when they are.

The observance of Martin Luther King's birthday sends us into the archives in search of MLK-related material. Newspaper reporter Marc Perrusquia joined us a while back to talk about his book A Spy in Canaan: How the FBI Used a Famous Photographer to Infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement . The level of infiltration and detail is amazing.

We continue our observance of Martin Luther King's birthday with more material about his time in history. The Vietnam War was one cause MLK devoted attention to, and it alienated him from some previous supporters when he spoke against the war. Christopher Goscha considered the war and all that came before in Vietnam: A New History .

Have you heard the stories of "segregation academies?" Those are the private schools that sprang up in the South after the Supreme Court ruled that public schools must integrate. Jim Grimsley's family kept him in public school, and his white life got quite an awakening when the first black students showed up. He tells the story in How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood .

Ashland has come a long way in nearly 100 years. The town that was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s now puts on one of the region's larger celebrations of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr . It's at high noon on the day MLK's birthday is observed, this year on January 21st. D.L. Richardson has MC'd the event for many years and Gina DuQuenne has helped shape the program for some time, too.

Even people who eat meat and enjoy it immensely can have a few pangs of conscience about it. It's nice to know that the animals we eat didn't suffer in life or its end. This month's edition of Savor, our food segment, brings food stylist Will Smith back into the studio. We talk about hearty meat dishes for mid-winter.

Does life at 50 match up to what we thought it would be at age 20? For that matter, does any 20-year-old even imagine life at 50? Former NPR reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty took serious stock of her life when she went through what she now calls a "faux midlife crisis." It led to a book called Life Reimagined .