Alternative Medicine - 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.

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. David M. Eisenberg, an integrative medicine researcher, defines it as "medical interventions not taught widely at US medical schools or generally available at US. hospitals," NCCAM states that formerly unproven remedies may be incorporated into conventional medicine if they are shown to be safe and effective. Barrie R. Cassileth, a researcher of complementary and alternative medicine, has summed up the situation as "not all mainstream physicians are pleased with CAM, with current efforts to integrate CAM into mainstream medicine, or with a separate NIH research entity for "alternative" medicine.

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