Taking stock of integrative medicine: Broadening biomedicine or co-option of complementary and alternative medicine?

Contextualizing Integration: A Critical Social Science Approach to Integrative Health Care

“…13 Viewed in this way, although there are a recent push for and attempts to implement a more diverse model of health care delivery in certain contexts, there are also evolutionarily processes occurring that may work against integration and produce new forms of appropriation and marginalization. 6,32,58,59 Although, at a broad level, diversity in educational programs and training is an important factor to facilitate communication and collaboration, there is little evidence that this factor has been taken seriously by stakeholders. A recent study on curriculum of medical schools in America found that more than half of the schools offer no education and training in integrative medicine or CAM.…”

Medical Tourism and Transnational Health Care

“…Some have doubts about IM because they fear that there has been a takeover of CAM by the orthodox medical community to pursue their goals of controlling and avoiding competition, as well as utilising CAM for profitmaking ventures (Baer, 2002(Baer, , 2008Hollenberg, 2007;Baer and Coulter, 2009). The possibility of making profit out of CAM integration must be viewed in light of the increasing global trend of privatisation and corporatisation of health care.…”

“…This has led to the inclusion of CAM and holistic health subjects into the curricula of a number of biomedical faculties of leading universities (Baer and Coulter, 2009). More governments are prepared to fund CAM research, and there is wider knowledge dissemination through a growing number of academic journals and monographs dealing specifically with CAM.…”

The social negotiation of illness: Doctors’ role as clinical or political in diagnosing patients with medically unexplained symptoms

“…To understand how doctors normalise this patient group's illness, for example, how they negotiate this patient groups' illness narrative (Bury, 1991), I draw on theory that focuses on the institutional aspect of identity processes (Goffman, 1990a, b;Jenkins, 1996Jenkins, , 2000Holstein and Gubrium, 2000;Gubrium and Holstein, 2001). As Nettleton (2006) argues, we must look at how the condition of the body in different social environments is negotiated and hence legitimised as either healthy or ill. As MUS patients' reported pain cannot be explained in purely biomedical terms, this group of patients is additionally addressed through complementary, alternative, integrative and/or holistic approaches (Baer, 2008;Fries, 2008;Hollenberg and Muzzin, 2010). Although the power of holistic and alternative approaches to negotiate, legitimise and treat illnesses is growing, such approaches are contested (Barker, 2008;Bendelow, 2009).…”