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When Listening to the People: Lessons from Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) for Bioethics

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Abstract

Complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) have become increasingly popular over recent decades. Within bioethics CAM has so far mostly stimulated discussions around their level of scientific evidence, or along the standard concerns of bioethics. To gain an understanding as to why CAM is so successful and what the CAM success means for health care ethics, this paper explores empirical research studies on users of CAM and the reasons for their choice. It emerges that there is a close connection to fundamental principles of medical ethics. The studies also highlight that CAM’s holistic ontology of health and illness has an empowering effect on people in caring for their health, and on an even deeper level, safeguards against biomedicine’s reducing image of oneself as biological body-machine. The question is raised what lessons bioethics should draw from this emancipatory social movement for its own relationship with biomedicine.

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Notes

  1. A survey conducted in the US in 1997 showed that 42.1% of the American population was visiting alternative medicine practitioners, which was a 47.3% increase in visits compared to 1990 (Eisenberg et al. 1998). Similar high use was found in other Western countries: for example 48% in Australia, 70% in Canada, 38% in Belgium and 75% in France (WHO 2002).

  2. This claim is also based on personal observation and experience as a medical practitioner and patient in Austrian, German and New Zealand hospitals.

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  1. Faculty of Medicine, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand

    Monika Clark-Grill

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  1. Monika Clark-Grill
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Clark-Grill, M. When Listening to the People: Lessons from Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) for Bioethics. Bioethical Inquiry 7, 71–81 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-010-9218-6

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