Alternative Medical Systems - Characterization - Institutions

Institutions

The World Health Organization defines complementary and alternative medicine as a broad set of health care practices that are not part of that country's own tradition and are not integrated into the dominant health care system.

In a consensus report released in 2005, entitled Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) defined complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as the non-dominant approach to medicine in a given culture and historical period. A similar definition has been adopted by the Cochrane Collaboration, and official government bodies such as the UK Department of Health. The Cochrane Collaboration Complementary Medicine Field finds that what is considered complementary or alternative practices in one country may be considered conventional medical practices in another. Their definition is, therefore, general: "complementary medicine includes all such practices and ideas that are outside the domain of conventional medicine in several countries and defined by its users as preventing or treating illness, or promoting health and well-being." As an example biofeedback is commonly used within the Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation community but is considered alternative within the medical community as a whole. While some herbal therapies are mainstream in Europe, but are alternative in the United States.

Proponents of evidence-based medicine, such as the Cochrane Collaboration, use the term alternative medicine but agree that all treatments, whether "mainstream" or "alternative", ought to be held to the standards of the scientific method.

The United States' National Science Foundation has defined alternative medicine as "all treatments that have not been proven effective using scientific methods."