Alternative Health Care: Medicine, Miracle, Or Mirage?

423 Pages·1999·1.29 MB·English

by  Michael S. Goldstein

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