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Various terms have been bandied around over the past several decades for a wide array of heterodox medical systems, ranging from professionalized to folk medical systems. Within the US context, the term that has become commonplace in various circles is complementary and alternative medicine, whereas, for example, in Australia it is simply complementary medicine.
What has come to be termed complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is actually an amorphous category that encompasses many medical systems and therapies in various national contexts, but particularly anglophone countries such as the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Whereas alternative practitioners and laypeople have tended to speak of holistic health, CAM and integrative medicine are in large part biomedical constructions. Most typologies of CAM tend to privilege western and Asian therapies over indigenous, folk, and religious therapies. Since the 1990s numerous biomedical practitioners have written overviews of CAM and have called for an evidence-based approach. In 1999 the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine (established in 1992 as a result of a Congressional mandate) was renamed the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Furthermore, health insurance companies, health maintenance organizations, and hospitals have become increasingly interested in CAM therapies as a way of satisfying patients’ demands and curtailing costs.
While CAM or integrative medicine often adheres to a notion of holism by invoking the mantra of mind-body-spirit connections, in reality it gives little attention to the political-economic and social structural determinants of illness. Integrative medicine, which purports to blend the best of bio-medicine and CAM, appears to function as a style of health care in which biomedicine treats alternative therapists as subordinates and alternative therapies as adjunct.
Bibliography:
- Baer, H. (2004) Towards an Integrative Medicine: From Holistic Health to Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek, CA.
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