The Sociopolitical Status of U. S. Naturopathy at the Dawn of the 21st Century

Notes:

• Naturopathic medicine in the United States had its inception around the turn of the 20th century. Subsequently, it underwent a process of relatively rapid growth until around the 1930s, followed by a period of gradual decline almost to the point of extinction due to biomedical opposition and the advent of “miracle drugs.” Because its therapeutic eclecticism had preadapted it to fit into the holistic health movement that emerged in the 1970s, it was able to undergo a process of organizational rejuvenation during the last two decades of the century. Nevertheless, U.S. naturopathy as a professionalized heterodox medical system faces several dilemmas as it enters the new millennium. These include (1) the fact that it has succeeded in obtaining licensure in only two sections of the country, namely, the Far West and New England; (2) increasing competition from partially professionalized and lay naturopaths, many of whom are graduates of correspondence schools; and (3) the danger of cooptation as many biomedical practitioners adopt natural therapies.

Divergence and Convergence in Two Systems of Manual Medicine: Osteopathy and Chiropractic in the United States

Notes:

• Although osteopathy and chiropractic emerged as medical revitalization movements with a similar disease theory during the late 19th century, osteopathy has evolved into osteopathic medicine and surgery, and chiropractic has evolved into a musculoskeletal speciality. In this article I attempt to explain the divergent evolution of these two schools of manual medicine in the United States by considering their respective roles in addressing various structural problems in American health care, their contrasting relationships with biomedicine, organized biomedicine’s stance toward the two alternative medical systems, and internal organizational conflicts within osteopathy and chiropractic. It will also show that both osteopathy and chiropractic were forced to some degree to converge with biomedicine both conceptually and therapeutically.

Chiropractic in the United States: Trends and Issues

Notes:

• Chiropractic is the best established of the alternative health care professions. Although marginalized for much of the 20th century, it has entered the mainstream of health care, gaining both legitimacy and access to third-party payers. However, the profession’s efforts to validate the effectiveness of spinal manipulative therapy, its principal modality, have yielded only modest and often contrary results. At the same time, reimbursement is shrinking, the number of practitioners is growing, and competition from other healing professions is increasing. The profession’s efforts to establish a role in primary care are meeting resistance, and its attempts to broaden its activities in alternative medicine have inherent limitations. Although patients express a high level of satisfaction with chiropractic treatment and politicians are sympathetic to it, this may not be enough as our nation grapples to define the health care system that it can afford.

An Ontology of Health: A Characterization of Human Health and Existence

Notes:

• The pursuit of health is one of the most basic and prevalent concerns of humanity. In order to better attain and preserve health, a fundamental and unified description of the concept is required. Using Paul Tillich’s ontological framework, I introduce a complete characterization of health and disease is that is useful to the philosophy of medicine and for health-care workers. Health cannot be understood merely as proper functioning of the physical body or of the separated levels of body, mind, and soul. Rather, the multidimensional unity that is the essence of human life requires a new understanding of health as balanced self-integration within the multiple human dimensions. The ontological description of health and disease has concrete implications for how health-care workers should approach healing. It calls for a multidimensional approach to healing in which particular healing is needed and helpful if it considers the other realms of the human. It reveals the importance of accepting limited health as well as the value of faith understood as an ultimate concern because of its ability to wholly integrate the person.

On the Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America

Notes:

• For the past half-century humoral medicine has been recognized by anthropologists to be the most important and widespread ethnomedical system in Latin America. While most scholars believe this system is largely a simplified folk variant of classical Greek and Persian humoral pathology, a small minority--particularly Audrey Butt Colson and Alfredo López Austin--argues for a New World origin. In this paper the author supports the former hypothesis by tracing the well-documented history of classical medicine from Greece and Persia to Latin America, where it was disseminated via formal medical education, hospitals and missionary orders, home medical guides and pharmacies. The fallacies in the arguments of Colson and López Austin are also pointed out.

Moving Lines and Variable Criteria: Differences/Connections between Allpathic and Alternative Medicine

Notes:

• The standard narratives of medicine recognize its origins in natural cures and in religious or spiritual discourses. The uneasy relationships of such practices (now designated as complementary or alternative medicine [CAM]) to conventional health care today can be tracked to the formation of medicine as a distinct profession based on modern science. The author accepts four statements as a framework for exploring CAM in the context of modern medicine. The first is that all versions of unconventional medicine depend for their identity on the existence of conventional medicine. The second is that the distinctions between alternative and conventional medicine are variables of time, place, and the attitudes of health care practitioners. Third, CAM today in the West occupies no sharp and distinctive category. There are instead continuums of various slopes and lengths on which types of complementary and alternative medicine are arrayed. Fourth, the turn to CAM may represent a chronic (and, to some, welcome) inclination of the human intellect to delimit the energies of material inquiries with metaphysical baselines and options.

Unorthodox Medicine and American Religious Life

The five generations of American medical revolutions

Tags:

• Family Practice
• Health Care Reform
• History, 18th Century
• History, 19th Century
• History, 20th Century
• Specialties, Medical
• Technology, Medical
• United States

Notes:

• Current medical authors frequently use the term “revolution,” yet American medicine is resisting change rather than embracing it. The last completed American medical revolutionary movement was the specialist-technologist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This paper describes a five-generational model of revolution. First-generation persons foment revolution; second-generation persons shape it into workable form and precipitate conflict; third-generation persons join the fight only when it appears to be all but won; fourth-generation persons enjoy the fruits of revolution; and fifth-generation persons, having risen to domination in the mature system, resist all attempts at reform by the next round of revolutionaries. In political revolutions, severe reactionary activity by the ruling party is often an indicator of an imminent overthrow by revolution. In scientific revolutions, the opposition of an established (specialist-technologist) paradigm to an emerging alternative (generalist) paradigm increases in intensity as the old order declines in strength; the opposition becomes most fierce just before the collapse of the old order. American specialist-technologist medicine, declining into its senescent fifth generation, will resist all but incremental change whenever possible, and accept major change only by force.

Early American mesmeric societies: a historical study

Tags:

• History, 18th Century
• History, 19th Century
• Humans
• Hypnosis
• Societies
• United States

Notes:

• Following an unsuccessful attempt by Mesmer to bring animal magnetism to the United States in 1784 through the Marquis de Lafayette, there was a period of little activity there for several decades. Then, concurrent with its revival in Europe and led by a few American practitioners who had been trained in France, several early societies of American magnetizers were founded beginning about 1815. These were initially organized in New York City and subsequently in New Orleans, Boston, Clinton, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Philadelphia. They played an important role in the development of hypnosis in America.

Human nature and the nature of reality: conceptual challenges from consciousness research

Tags:

• Consciousness
• Emotions
• Humans
• Psychology
• Psychotherapy

Notes:

• Holotropic states (a large special subgroup of nonordinary states of consciousness) have been the focus of many fields of modern research, such as experiential psychotherapy, clinical and laboratory work with psychedelic substances, field anthropology, thanatology, and therapy with individuals undergoing psychospiritual crises (“spiritual emergencies”). This research has generated a plethora of extraordinary observations that have undermined some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy. Some of these new findings seriously challenge the most basic philosophical tenets of Western science concerning the relationship between matter, life, and consciousness. This article summarizes the most important major revisions that would have to be made in our understanding of consciousness and of the human psyche in health and disease to accommodate these conceptual challenges. These areas of changes include: a new understanding and cartography of the human psyche; the nature and architecture of emotional and psychosomatic disorders; therapeutic mechanisms and the process of healing; the strategy of psychotherapy and self-exploration; the role of spirituality in human life; and the nature of reality.

Present at the creation: the clinical pastoral movement and the origins of the dialogue between religion and psychiatry

Homeopathy and the new fundamentalism: a critique of the critics

Tags:

• Biomedical Research
• Complementary Therapies
• Evidence-Based Medicine
• Great Britain
• Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice
• Homeopathy
• Humans
• Mass Media
• Meta-Analysis as Topic
• Primary Health Care
• Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
• State Medicine

Notes:

• Though in use for over 200 years, and still benefiting millions of people worldwide today, homeopathy is currently under continuous attacks for being “unscientific.” The reasons for this can be understood in terms of what might be called a “New Fundamentalism,” emanating particularly but not exclusively from within biomedicine, and supported in some sections of the media. Possible reasons for this are discussed. New Fundamentalism’s hallmarks include the denial of evidence for the efficacy of any therapeutic modality that cannot be consistently “proven” using double-blind, randomized controlled trials. It excludes explanations of homeopathy’s efficacy; ignores, excoriates, or considers current research data supporting those explanations incomprehensible, particularly from outside biomedicine: it is also not averse to using experimental bias, hearsay, and innuendo in order to discredit homeopathy. Thus, New Fundamentalism is itself unscientific. This may have consequences in the future for how practitioners, researchers, and patients of homeopathy/complementary and alternative medicine engage and negotiate with primary health care systems.

How to Speak Postmodern: Medicine, Illness, and Cultural Change

Notes:

• The modernist “biomedical model” offers an inadequate understanding of illness. At the same time, some of the conceptual constructs that are offered to supplement the biomedical model are carelessly employed. Much that is said and written about empathy and healing, in particular, fails to reflect the historical and critical self-awareness of postmodern thinking at its best.

A Comparison of Christian Science and Mainline Christian Healing Ideologies and Practices

Notes:

• Within the past decade there has been an increasing interest shown in the practice of spiritual healing. Evidence suggests that a sizable minority of Americans not only believe in spiritual healing but also that they have personally experienced such a healing. This article empirically explores the differences in ideology and practices of a group of Christian Scientists and another of Mainstream Christians who have experienced a physical healing as a result of prayer. It concludes with a discussion of the future of the two very different streams of the religious healing movement.

Is homeopathy a science?--Continuity and clash of concepts of science within holistic medicine

Tags:

• Holistic Health
• Homeopathy
• Humans
• Science

Notes:

• The question of whether homeopathy is a science is currently discussed almost exclusively against the background of the modern concept of natural science. This approach, however, fails to notice that homeopathy-in terms of history of science-rests on different roots that can essentially be traced back to two most influential traditions of science: on the one hand, principles and notions of Aristotelism which determined 2,000 years of Western history of science and, on the other hand, the modern concept of natural science that has been dominating the history of medicine for less than 200 years. While Aristotle’s “science of the living” still included ontologic and teleologic dimensions for the sake of comprehending nature in a uniform way, the interest of modern natural science was reduced to functional and causal explanations of all phenomena for the purpose of commanding nature. In order to prevent further ecological catastrophes as well as to regain lost dimensions of our lives, the one-sidedness and theory-loadedness of our modern natural-scientific view of life should henceforth be counterbalanced by lifeworld-practical Aristotelic categories. In this way, the ground would be ready to conceive the scientific character of homeopathy-in a broader, Aristotelian sense.

Spiritual and alternative healthcare practices of the Amish

Electric Medicine and Mesmerism

ABC of Complementary Medicine: The Manipulative Therapies: Osteopathy and Chiropractic

ABC of Complementary Medicine: Homoeopathy

ABC of Complementary Medicine: Hypnosis and Relaxation Therapies

ABC of Complementary Medicine: Massage Therapies

American medicine as religious practice: care of the sick as a sacred obligation and the unholy descent into secularization

Christian Science Healing

The Christian Science Textbook: An Analysis of the Religious Authority of Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy

Hypnosis and surgery: past, present, and future

Tags:

• Forecasting
• Humans
• Hypnosis
• Hypnosis, Anesthetic
• Surgical Procedures, Operative

Notes:

• Hypnosis has been defined as the induction of a subjective state in which alterations of perception or memory can be elicited by suggestion. Ever since the first public demonstrations of “animal magnetism” by Mesmer in the 18th century, the use of this psychological tool has fascinated the medical community and public alike. The application of hypnosis to alter pain perception and memory dates back centuries. Yet little progress has been made to fully comprehend or appreciate its potential compared to the pharmacologic advances in anesthesiology. Recently, hypnosis has aroused interest, as hypnosis seems to complement and possibly enhance conscious sedation. Contemporary clinical investigators claim that the combination of analgesia and hypnosis is superior to conventional pharmacologic anesthesia for minor surgical cases, with patients and surgeons responding favorably. Simultaneously, basic research of pain pathways involving the nociceptive flexion reflex and positron emission tomography has yielded objective data regarding the physiologic correlates of hypnosis. In this article I review the history, basic scientific and clinical studies, and modern practical considerations of one of the oldest therapeutical tools: the power of suggestion.