An Overview of Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Complementary medicine includes healing practices carried out alongside, or in complement to, allopathic medicine. Alternative medicine are those practices done in lieu of, or as an alternative to, allopathic medicine.

CAM (complementary/alternative medicine) differs from allopathic medicine in a number of ways. Recall that allopathic medicine is reductionistic (the person is reduced to a series of parts) and mechanistic (the body behaves predictably, similar to a machine). CAM, in contrast, is wholistic (the person is a whole being rather than the sum of parts) and individualistic (each person is a unique being). These philosophical underpinnings become more important when facing healthcare, especially treatment, decisions. More on that in a later post.

Those in the allopathic realm of healing often dismiss CAM as unproven and anecdotal, meaning that CAM relies on individual experiences rather than on the results of the carefully controlled clinical trials that are the "gold standard" of research into allopathic medicine. Indeed, the very existence of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is to provide support for and dispersal of research findings into CAM. However, recall that the philosophical underpinnings of the two approaches differ in how they even perceive the nature of a human being. While clinical trials supporting CAM practices are extremely valuable, many of the concepts underlying some CAM practices defy control and manipulation by traditional quantitative research methods. Many CAM practitioners believe that it is more effective and safer to treat a person based upon his or her individual nature than it is to apply a treatment that has been generalized to a faceless crowd. Another way of looking at this is "shooting a gnat with a cannonball".

CAM includes four categories of healing interventions: body/mind medicine, biologically based practices, manipulative and body based practices, and energy medicine. These categories are frequently used in conjunction with one another, and occasionally a healing action could conceivably fall into more than one category. For example, homeopathic remedies often crossover between biologically based and energy medicine--being plant-, mineral-, or animal-based but working on an energetic level. So these four categories are not at all mutually-exclusive. Despite this, that's how we'll discuss them in upcoming posts. ~Whitney