Alternative Medicine

A Brief History

Strictly speaking, alternative medicine refers to treatments that are used instead of conventional medicine. Complementary and alternative medicine and traditional, complementary, and alternative medicine are terms that are frequently used when discussing alternative medicine. Complementary medicine refers to therapies that are used in conjunction with mainstream treatment, while traditional medicine refers to medical practices that predate Western medicine and are still used in traditional societies in many parts of the world. Integrative medicine and holistic medicine are also terms used to refer to alternative medicine. Both terms imply a fusion of alternative and mainstream approaches that address a patient's total wellness.

Conventional medicine is also referred to as allopathic medicine, mainstream medicine, Western medicine, biomedical approaches to medicine, and science-based medicine. Globally, alternative medicine refers to medical practices that fall outside the domain of mainstream Western medical practices as are used in industrialized nations such as in the [Page 34]United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Europe. Many of these practices have their origins in developing nations, such as in China or India, or among the indigenous peoples of industrialized nations, and are thus considered traditional medicine rather than alternative medicine. Acknowledging the importance of all of the above differentiations, the term alternative medicine will be used throughout this entry (for consistency) to refer to alternative, complementary, integrative, and traditional medicine as the combined medical counterpart to conventional Western medicine.

Alternative medicine as it is largely practiced in the United States today originated in the combative struggles between various natural therapies and schools of thought and conventional medicine taking place from the early 1800s to the early 1900s. These early therapies had emerged as a reaction against ineffective and painful medical practices of the early 1800s. Various alternative medicine approaches, such as homeopathy, water therapy, and hypnotism, gained popularity in the late 1880s and early 1900s, reflecting the political trends of the times, including democratization of medical knowledge and identification with the Romantic period in art and literature, in which nature was highly valued. Despite the popularity of alternative therapies, practitioners and the various schools of thought were not well organized, and by the early 1900s, had largely fallen out of favor, losing public attention to the scientific discoveries of that period.

Alternative medicine reemerged in the late 1960s and 1970s as interest in alternatives to conventional medicine arose as part of the larger counterculture distrust of authority and disillusionment with the mainstream that infused the United States during the Vietnam War era, as well as the growing costs of conventional health care that would characterize the 1980s. Although alternative medicine grew in popularity throughout the 1980s, alternative medicine went largely unacknowledged by the conventional medical establishment until the early 1990s when, after two centuries, the field came into its own with federal and scholarly recognition.

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