Alternative Medicine - Integrative Medicine, Complementary Medicine, Fringe Medicine

Integrative Medicine, Complementary Medicine, Fringe Medicine

Integrative medicine is the combination of the practices and methods of alternative/complementary medicine with conventional medicine. It may include preventive medicine and patient-centered medicine. It may also include practices not normally referred to as medicine, such as using prayer, meditation, socializing, and recreation as therapies. Its academic proponents sometimes recommend misleading patients by using known placebo treatments in order to achieve a placebo effect. However, a 2010 survey of family physicians found that 56% of respondents said they had used a placebo in clinical practice as well. Eighty-five percent of respondents believed placebos can have both psychological and physical benefits. A number of universities and hospitals have departments of integrative medicine.

Criticism of integrative medicine includes about proposing to lie to patients about alternative medicines known to be no more than a placebo in order to achieve a placebo effect, and “diverting research time, money, and other resources from more fruitful lines of investigation in order to pursue a theory that has no basis in biology”.

"Quackademic medicine" is a pejorative term used for “integrative medicine”, when considered to be an infiltration of quackery into academic science-based medicine, and was picked up by science-based medicine anti-ACM critics.