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Accepted Paper:

Using discourse analysis to explore the relationship between complementary and alternative medicine and biomedicine  
Margaret McGowan (Edinburgh Napier University) Salma Siddique (Connecticut College)

Paper short abstract:

The complex relationship between complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and biomedicine is explored using discourse analysis. Power relations and professional boundaries, science as a belief system, the nature of evidence and research, and the impact on patient care will be analysed.

Paper long abstract:

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) presents a view of health, illness and the body which challenges traditional biomedical and scientific assumptions. As CAM increases in popularity in the UK and other countries with primarily biomedical healthcare systems, biomedicine faces challenges to its position of authority and influence in the arena of health and health care. The way biomedicine faces these challenges will necessarily impact on patient care.

Discourse analysis, carried out on journal and newspaper articles and blog entries on the subject of CAM, explores the complex relationship between CAM and biomedicine, revealing how both think about themselves and each other, and how power relations and professional boundaries adapt and shift in response to new challenges and trends. This paper will analyse: the ways in which CAM's challenges to biomedicine actually maintain and reinforce the very culture they are attempting to counter by using biomedicine and science as a yardstick, appealing to biomedicine to bestow legitimacy, and by increasing scientisation; science as a belief system, whose adherents can be dedicated and dogmatic in its defence; the notion of evidence, evidence-based practice, and research and what these mean for CAM; and the seeming lack of focus on patients and their needs, the way patients are denied agency, and how this affects patient care.

Conclusions and recommendations include; increased and improved communication on all sides; greater educational opportunities; more appropriate research methods for investigating CAM; and greater focus on the needs and wishes of patients.

Panel P11
Public health: anthropological collaboration and critique
  Session 1