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The popularity and practice of alternative medicine continues to expand at astonishing rates. In Healing Traditions, Bonnie Blair O'Connor considers the conflicts that arise between the values and assumptions of Western, scientific medicine and those of unconventional health systems. Providing in-depth examples of the importance and benefits of alternative health practices-including the extraordinarily extensive and sophisticated HIV/AIDS alternative therapies movement-O'Connor identifies ways to integrate alternative strategies with orthodox medical treatments in order to ensure the best possible care for patients.In spite of the long-standing prediction that, as science and medicine progressed-and education became more generally available-unconventional systems would die out, they have persisted with undiminished vitality. They have, in fact, experienced a reinvigoration and expansion during the last fifteen to twenty years. In the United States, this renewal is fueled by people representing a wide cross-section of American society, and most of them also use conventional medicine. This eclecticism can result in conflicts between the values and assumptions of Western, scientific medicine and those of unconventional health systems.O'Connor demonstrates the importance of understanding how various belief systems interact and how this interaction affects health care. She argues that through neutral observation and thorough description of health belief systems it is possible to gain an understanding of those systems, to identify likely points of conflict among systems-especially conflicts that may occur in conventional care settings-and to intervene in ways that ensure the best possible care for patients

Drawing on the wider experience of other Western and Eastern countries, this book explores the interface between orthodox medicine and alternative medicine in Britain and the United States, outlining the development of these separate categories of medicine from a relatively undifferentiated past

AbstractComplementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and traditional medicine (TM) are important social phenomena. This article reviews the sociological literature on the topic. First, it addresses the question of terminology, arguing that the naming process is a glimpse into the complexities of power and history that characterize the field. Second, focusing on the last 15 years of scholarship, it considers how sociological research on users and practitioners of TM/CAM has developed in that time. Third, it addresses two newer strands of work termed here the 'big picture' and the 'big question'. The big picture includes concepts that offer interpretation of what is happening at a societal level to constrain and enable observed patterns of social practice (pluralism, integration, hybridity and activism). The big question, 'Does it work?', is one of epistemology and focuses on two developing fields of critical enquiry – first, social critiques of medical science knowledge production and, second, attempts to explain the nature of interventions, i.e. how they work. Finally, the article examines the role of sociology moving forward.

Intro -- Series Editors' Preface -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- 1: Introduction: Reconceptualising Complementary and Alternative Medicine as Knowledge Production and Social Transformation -- Introduction -- Current Sociological Understandings of CAM -- Reconceptualising CAM as Knowledge Production and Social Transformation: Engaging with STS -- Boundary Work and Social Worlds Frameworks in the Study of CAM -- CAM and Actor-Network Theory: Exploring Materiality and Relationality -- CAM as Epistemic Object -- Overview of the Volume -- Conclusion -- References -- Part I: Defining CAM: Boundaries Between and Within CAM and Biomedicine -- 2: Evidence-Based Alternative, 'Slanted Eyes' and Electric Circuits: Doing Chinese Medicine in the Post/Socialist Czech Republic -- Medical Acupuncture: Biomedicalising CM During Socialism -- Traditional CM: Cultivating Autonomy and Care with 'Slanted Eyes' -- TCM: Establishing an 'Evidence-Based' Alternative -- Conclusion -- References -- 3: The Incompatibility Between Social Worlds in Complementary and Alternative Medicine: The Case of Therapeutic Touch -- Introduction -- Theoretical and Methodological Issues -- Social Worlds in the Controversy over Therapeutic Touch -- Scepticism -- Medicine -- Nursing Research -- Nursing -- Therapeutic Touch -- Conclusion -- References -- 4: Qigong in Three Social Worlds: National Treasure, Social Signifier, or Breathing Exercise? -- Introduction -- Research Material and Methods -- Qigong as National Treasure -- Qigong as Social Signifier -- Qigong as Breathing Exercise -- Discussion -- References -- Part II: Doing CAM in Different Contexts: Politics, Regulation and Materiality.

In this paper, the author compares phenomena of political populism and alternative medicine on the ground of – similar in structure and content – narrations (and identities created on their basis) of propagators and followers of these ideas/ social praxis. The main thesis of the paper is the assumption that the narrative and identity mechanisms of alternative medicine are analogous to those of political populism. The author tries to prove it in the context of their relation to their counterparts in the mainstream of power/knowledge, with the assumption that these are dialectical relations understood in a specific manner. The oppositions of populism–liberal democracy and alternative medicine–conventional medicine are real, but in the broader sense, they complement and need each other to preserve the cores of the system, which implicates ineffectiveness of those alternative discourses. This article presents examples of anti-elitism and conspiratorial thinking both in political populism and in alternative medicine. It turns out that populism and unconventional medicine are so closely connected that alternative medicine, in its attitudes, refers not only to medical statements, but also to political ones.

In the early 1990s, Americans spent an estimated $27 billion on alternative medical treatments. However, most of those expenditures were paid out of pocket rather than by health insurers. This article reviews empirical studies of third-party coverage of complementary & alternative medicine (CAM) & the factors behind the reluctance of health insurers to provide benefits for those treatments. This reluctance is based on three principal factors: a lack of scientific evidence supporting CAM providers' claims of medical efficacy, the absence of credentialing standards for many CAM providers, & difficulties in fitting CAM treatments into typological schemes that determine levels of reimbursement by health insurers. Possibilities for overcoming these obstacles to the integration of CAM into the American system of health insurance are discussed. 29 References. [Copyright 2002 Sage Publications, Inc.]

The miraculous cure of the blind god Plutos ("Wealth') in Aristophanes' play illuminates some of the reasons why people have sought help in alternative medicine over the ages. Apart from limitations of conventional medicine these factors can be social, political, religious, psychological, and scientific. Alternative medicine may function in a complementary way to the conventional. Nevertheless, an overestimation of its therapeutic potentials by the public can lead to the domination of irrationalism, all in the name of liberation from the shackles of a mechanistic rationalism.

This article addresses the tension between conceptualizations of the objective body, which are central to biomedicine, and conceptualizations of the expressive body. Within a metaphysics which can be an adequate grounding for the practice of alternative medicine, I argue, the natural body must be fully conceptualized as both object and as expressive. I draw on phenomenology and on actor-network theory to outline a new model of `biosocial nature' which is inherently figurative and which is constructed by a network of human and non-human actors. I then look at two remedies within the homeopathic materia medica, arguing that their capacity to treat ill health by acting as nodes with a network of `imagined connections' is more explicable within a biosocial than within a modernist metaphysics.