Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle, Or Mirage? PDF
Preview Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle, Or Mirage?
Cover Contents Acknowledgments 1 The Emergence of Alternative Medicine 2 Victims of Medicine Changing Views of Health and Illness Crisis and Change in the Health Care System The Synergy of Complaint: Birth of a Grievance 3 The Core of Alternative Medicine: Age-Old Wisdom Made New Holism The Interpenetration of Mind, Body, and Spirit Health as a Positive State on a Continuum with Illness Life Suffused by the Flow of Energy Vitalism The Healing Process The Core of Alternative Medicine 4 Medicine and the Spirit Spirituality in America Science and Spirit Conventional Medicine's Response Turning Religion into Medicine Turning Medicine into Religion Spirituality's Impact on the Future of Alternative Medicine 5 Is There Really an Alternative Medicine? Alternative Medicine as a Professional Entity Gaining Legal Acceptance Recognition by Conventional Medicine The Mass Media and the Public Alternative Medicine as an Identity Freedom and Health 6 The Politics of Alternative Medicine: Personal and Practical Personal Politics Practical Politics 7 Alternative Medicine, Mainstream Markets Alternative Medicine as Small Business Alternative Medicine as Big Business The Convergence into Mainstream Health Care Alternative Medicine as Corporate Medicine From Care to Commodity 8 The Future of Alternative Medicine Assimilation and Cooptation An Identity Movement Notes Bibliography Index Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 The Emergence of Alternative Medicine 1 2 Victims of Medicine 13 Changing Views of Health and Illness 15 Crisis and Change in the Health Care System 24 The Synergy of Complaint: Birth of a Grievance 37 3 The Core of Alternative Medicine: Age-Old Wisdom Made New 40 Holism 44 The Interpenetration of Mind, Body, and Spirit 48 Health as a Positive State on a Continuum with Illness 54 Life Suffused by the Flow of Energy 58 Vitalism 61 The Healing Process 63 The Core of Alternative Medicine 68 4 Medicine and the Spirit 74 Spirituality in America 77 Science and Spirit 81 Conventional Medicine's Response 87 Turning Religion into Medicine 90 Acknowledgments If not for Michael Ames, my editor at Temple University Press, this book would not have been written. He urged me to write the prospectus and showed me how to change it into something much better than it was. The quality of what I've produced has been infinitely enhanced by two of the most wonderful research assistants. Sara Shostak worked with me in the early stages, assembling and shaping the raw material into a first draft. Her perceptivcness, intellectual acuity, and unfailing good spirits were crucial in too many ways to mention. Anna Dorman assisted me at the later stages, rewriting, editing, and preparing the manuscript. Her clarity, grace, and good judgment reflect those pervasive qualities within her. I was able to pay these two assistants through the generosity of a grant from the Fetzer Institute of Kalamazoo, Michigan. The institute's support, and especially the support of the late Ken Klivington, was essential and is gratefully acknowledged. 1— The Emergence of Alternative Medicine In 1983 when Joshua, my oldest son, was eighteen months old, a hot iron fell on his foot and remained there until the person watching him discovered it. Most of the skin on the top of his tiny foot was gone. The emergency room doctor, his pediatrician, and three or four physician friends who examined him all agreed this was a "third-degree burn." There was no way it could ever heal by itself. The only reasonable course of action was a skin graft. The well-known surgeon at a highly regarded bum center concurred. Laura (his mother) and I both felt lucky that the surgery could be scheduled very quickly. But our feelings changed when we found out that our son would have to be tied to his bed for the entire lengthy hospitalization to prevent him from scratching at the graft, and that the sight of this would be so upsetting that we would be restricted to a brief visit each day. There had to be something else we could try before subjecting our little baby, no less ourselves, to such an ordeal. Laura's brother had a suggestion. He knew that in Japan, after the atomic bomb was dropped, the juice of the aloe vera plant had been used to treat people with much more severe burns. When we decided to try this ourselves, the Japanese proprietor of a nearby nursery offered helpful advice on which parts of the plant to use and how to start growing our own supply so as not to be dependent on him. Three times a day I carefully dripped the freshly cut aloe vera onto the wound. As I did, I drew on my 2— Victims of Medicine To what is "alternative medicine" an alternative? In the United States health care institutions and professionals exist in such great numbers and diversity that defining what is meant by "mainstream" medicine is an increasingly difficult undertaking. In what observers call the "medicalization of everything," medical terms, workers, and institutions have come to encompass most every domain of human interaction. Given such profusion, defining mainstream medicine as that which is typically taught in medical schools and practiced in hospitals may seem reasonable. In fact, mainstream medicine is undergoing constant change. Over the past few decades its credibility and status in society have been repeatedly challenged. Taken together, these challenges have fueled a search for new ways of understanding the nature of illness and of delivering health care. Alternative medicine is one response to this crisis in conventional care. Typically, the conceptual basis for delineating the medical mainstream is the notion that it is roughly synonymous with "scientific medicine," also frequently called "biomedicine." It is the dominance of scientific medicine and its elaboration in research, clinical practice, and the development of medical technology and specialties that comprise the medical mainstream. Scientific medicine in America is usually traced to the reforms of the Flexner Report of 1910. The explicit goals of the Flexner Report, as well as the Carnegie Foundation that sponsored it and the small elite of European trained physicians who avidly supported it, were both to establish empirical scientific rationality as the basis of future medical training and practice
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