Petit bourgeois health care? The big small-business of private complementary medical practice

Silent voices: Women, complementary medicine, and the co-optation of change

Despite the prominence of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in public and policy debates, our knowledge of the relationship between CAM and gender remains undeveloped. By tracing two dominant strands of research involving the women's health movement and the implications of CAM's increasing popularity among women, this article draws attention to the need for research addressing the roles of women as practitioners and students of CAM. It is argued that the medicalization and co-optation of CAM has serious implications for women's health by constraining CAM's potential to challenge, resist, and transform the hegemony and inequalities of biomedicine.

CAM in Canada: places, practices, research

This paper reflects on the practice and research of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Canada. Although certain trends in use, as well as the regulation and integration of CAM, are mirrored in many other developed countries, some are highlighted as uniquely Canadian with distinct political and economic geographies. Similarly, although like in other countries the research of CAM is growing rapidly, Canadian scholars have been particularly productive in terms of providing unique disciplinary perspectives and the ways in which they have organized their research training and collaborations. CAM is clearly not a fully integrated and researched option in Canadian health care, yet Canada exhibits the foundations for an integrated CAM practice, supported by a growing, wide-ranging and well-articulated research evidence-base.

Addressing efficiency: economic evaluation and the agenda for CAM researchers

Considerations of efficiency are increasingly part of the broad agenda for evidence-based practice in conventional medicine. The findings of applied economic evaluations are often combined with other forms of evidence to assist clinical and wider resource decisions. It follows that as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) strives for further integration into conventional health services, it might also be subjected to such scrutiny. In preparation for this, this paper provides a basic yet critical introduction to applied economic evaluation; the types of techniques used, their broad strengths and weaknesses, related ethical and moral debate and, in particular, specific issues concerning their application to CAM. Readers will decide for themselves whether they might be supportive of, or opposed to, economic evaluation and under what circumstances. Nevertheless, a wide-ranging agenda for research on economic evaluation and CAM is presented and some basic methodological and design issues--including place specificities and sensitivities--are highlighted.