Main description:

Patients are choosing to seek treatments from outside the mainstream medical industry, in greater numbers than ever before, and the alternative medical industry is now a considerable force in its own right: in 2002, US consumers spent more than $15 billion on alternative, complementary, or just plain quack medicines and therapies. Alternative treatments are also becoming more popular among British patients, and more accepted by the medical establishment: doctors recently won the right to refer their patients to alternative healers, and to pay for those treatments from National Health Service funds. Acupuncture is offered in shop windows, and ayurveda is the subject of major advertising campaigns. The growing popularity of heterodox and non-Western medical systems in the West, has provoked highly controversial claims about 'the failure of reason' among medical consumers, and counter-claims about biomedical arrogance and dogmatism.
In "Culture and Complements", Roberta E Bivins explores and evaluates the alternative medical industry, asking whether the current revival in cross-cultural cures is built upon equally ephemeral foundations as in the past, or whether it is really as unique - and durable - a phenomenon as the pundits and promoters claim. She also examines the current and historical appeal of exotic and conventional medical systems and considers how governments, medical professionals and educators, and medical consumers at every level, have responded to their widespread availability. What does their popularity reveal about our changing perceptions of medicine, the body and indeed, ourselves as citizens of an increasingly globalized, but also increasingly fragmented society?