Alternative medicine?

Although acupuncture, hearbal treatments, yoga, meditation, bodywork, and other forms of so-called "alternative" medicine are still for the most part considered outside the boundaries of conventional biomedicine, they are becoming more accepted and legitimated by health care practioners, health insurers, and the medicial establishment more generally. One example of the "mainstreaming" of alternative medicine is the establishment of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which is one of the newest research centers within the National Institutes of Health. Founded in the late 1990s, this center, which used to be called the Office of Alternative Medicine, is funding and conducting research on the possible health benefits of an array of alternative healing modalities. The center's website discusses the center's studies, as well as serves as a databate on research conducted by other instutions worldwide. Although the center doesn't get nearly as much federal funding as, say, the National Cancer Institute (nor is the center an official "institute"), the government's acknowledgement that alternative healing modalities are worth scientific investigation is for the most part a good thing.

At the same time, the "western" biomedical approach to the healing potential of alternative modalities raises some interesting phenomonological and epistemological questions: for example, how do you measure the efficacy of traditional chinese acupuncture when the practice is based on the principle that the body has hundreds of energy channels running through it--energy channels that cannot be seen through visual means and do not necessarily corrolate with the biomedicalized body that consists of physical parts (organs, veins, cells, etc)? When studies find that acupuncture helps to relieve pain, nausea and other ailments, what explanatory frameworks for the practice's efficacy are put forth by researchers? As acupuncture has become increasingly legitimated by conventional biomedicine and increasingly practiced by medical doctors, has the practice lost any of its traditional chinese phenomonology, or have medical pracitioners found ways to integrate and embrace both notions of the body simultaneously? Of course, there are several high profile doctors who do this type of integrative work, including Andrew Weil, David Simon, Rudolph Valentine, Christiane Northrup, and Deepak Chopra.

I haven't done much research on this particular topic myself, but it is one that I'm interested in, and one that other academics have written about. A cool study that I'd like to conduct at some point would be to interview biomedical practioners who also practice accupuncture to learn the many ways that they integrate both "western" and "eastern" knowledge and "ways of knowing."