Regulation and the Positioning of Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Abstract

Most developed and prosperous countries have seen their reliance on conventional medicine paralleled by an exponential growth of interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) (Eastwood, 2000; McGregor and Peay, 1996). In this chapter, we discuss some of the results relating to research conducted by the authors that explored the ways in which CAM is used, understood and evaluated in terms of its perceived utility by patients with cancer in the UK and Pakistan. Our focus here, compared with earlier chapters, is less on formal processes of regulation and evaluation of IHTs, and more on the ways in which patients (and patient groups) position CAM in relation to orthodox medicine. We show how there are quite diverse ways in which this can occur that reflect different interpretive and interactional repertoires used by patients and CAM groups. Focusing on our UK data, we argue that the degree to which it is possible to build a genuinely ‘alternative’ medicine is constrained by organisational and gate-keeping constraints imposed on CAM groups.