What are the reasons for the popularity of "alternative medicine" ("AM" or "CAM" for "complementary and alternative medicine")? And why now? The question is challenging, the search for answers tantalizing, and the answers difficult to substantiate. As in a braid, no one factor can explain the whole phenomenon.
- - - - - - - - - - - -

Predisposing and Antecedent Systems

There are a number of predisposing psychological and political influences. In North America, such influences include a mistrust of government, politicians, highbrows, elitists, professionals, and other authorities. Other factors are deregulation, loss of power of governmental agencies, increasing court awards for perceived injuries, and Internet do-it-yourself medicine.

In Germany, perhaps a key factor is the feeling of unity with Nature (Naturphilosophie) required for action to be complete and satisfying. Add a tint of Hahnemann's homeopathy, Steiner's anthroposophical medicine, and a few mystical legends. In Britain, perhaps it is the tolerance of the unique, eccentric, and bizarre. In Asia, it is the sense of tradition and partnering of spirituality and cosmology with all phases of life.

North Americans are enamored of a melange of folkways from European countries, mixed through the 18th and 19th centuries into a new brand.

North Americans are enamored of a melange of folkways from European countries, mixed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into a new brand. Thomson, Kellogg, Post, Graham, and Mary Baker Eddy interpreted and recombined them, and passed them through D. D. Palmer to Jack Lalanne, Andrew Weil, and Larry Dossey.

Technical, professional, scientific medicine is about a hundred years old. We separate slowly from folkway methods that stick to common consciousness. We reflect and repeat our parents' quaint ideas and irritating habits. One of my family's holdovers was that fever came from toxins built up in the colon -- a notion familiar to turn-of-the-century scholars as one of Kellogg's basic premises, putrefaction. It resulted in the feared, torturous enema, a punishment for having gotten ill.

		Alan Alda gets the Wally Sampson's take on several unproven herbal remedies in A Day with Wally Sampson.

Then there are customs like wearing of animal fat around the torso and the water cures (soaks and religious purification rites to drive out bad spirits that inhabit warm places). They appeal to those who want to explore the past, hoping to find Answers to Everything in mysteries, then proclaiming them to the unawakened public. These emotional-spiritual undercurrents of need are strong determinants of behavior, say historians and psychologists. We tend to agree.
- - - -- - - - - - - -
5 pages: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5