Your “Good Medicine” Guide to CAM
There is no complementary or alternative medicine (CAM). There is only medicine; medicine that has been tested and found to be safe and effective—use it; pay for it. Medicine that has been tested and found not to be safe and effective—don’t use it; don’t pay for it. And medicine that is plausible but has not been tested—test it; and then place it into one of the two prime categories. If safe and effective, integrate it into mainstream medicine. Strange as it may seem to some readers, this prescription for action applies equally to medical practices taught in standard “Western” medical schools and practiced by licensed U.S. MDs and also to all those practices taught in those “other” health education institutions and practiced by so-called “alternative” practitioners. Sadly, there are many diagnostic and therapeutic practices in both camps yet to be properly tested and acted on.
The landmark theme issue of JAMA published in late 1998 demonstrated that it was possible, and responsible, to apply well-established scientific methods to the study of many CAM practices and begin that great parsing into “safe and effective” or “not safe or effective.” That JAMA also convincingly illustrated that it was respectable for U.S. MDs to talk seriously with their patients about CAM. The science of CAM (yes or no) is much clearer now; some CAM works, much does not.
Americans, and people of all countries, use the methods and products called CAM, for better or worse. They deserve such medical treatments to be informed by “best evidence.” Doctors of many types and the public observe patients improving, even recovering, after an encounter with a “healer,” regardless of the modality that healer applied. Such anecdotal experiences lead patients and practitioners to believe, even fervently, that the modality applied caused the therapeutic success, when actually only time and biology produced the success.
There is a vast historical, cultural, experiential, and increasingly clinical and evidentiary literature about that body of practice termed “CAM.” I know of no other one place where the interested reader can find a better collection of accurate and objective information about such CAM as the Micozzi text, Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, now into its fourth edition (first edition, 1996). Those persons who are biased (and there are still many) both for and against CAM in general and with specific CAM modalities may or may not be swayed by the voluminous content in this 624-page tome. But the editor Marc Micozzi, MD, PhD, and his 50 assembled authors deserve our thanks and praise for bringing us this detailed and compelling updated product to clarify this field of increasing importance as it becomes more and more integrated into the mainstream.