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."
Read more about this topic: Alternative Medical Systems, Characterization
Famous quotes containing the word institutions:
“Is it not manifest that our academic institutions should have a wider scope; that they should not be timid and keep the ruts of the last generation, but that wise men thinking for themselves and heartily seeking the good of mankind, and counting the cost of innovation, should dare to arouse the young to a just and heroic life; that the moral nature should be addressed in the school-room, and children should be treated as the high-born candidates of truth and virtue?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Have we no culture, no refinement,—but skill only to live coarsely and serve the Devil?—to acquire a little worldly wealth, or fame, or liberty, and make a false show with it, as if we were all husk and shell, with no tender and living kernel to us? Shall our institutions be like those chestnut burs which contain abortive nuts, perfect only to prick the fingers?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... no woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)