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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Dissertations and Theses

Sociology

Alternative medicine

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Physicians Providing Alternative Medicine: Boundary Crossing And The Emergence Of Integrative Medicine, Richard Scott Lockwood Jun 2008

Physicians Providing Alternative Medicine: Boundary Crossing And The Emergence Of Integrative Medicine, Richard Scott Lockwood

Dissertations and Theses

Integrative medicine (IM) has organized as a new area of specialization in mainstream healthcare. The development of IM is widely attributed to popular demand for the range of therapies known collectively as Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). During the 1990's the rate of acceptance of CAM accelerated among consumers, professions, financing and education. The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) measured CAM utilization and professional service provision during the years 1996 and 1998, but never since. These surveys were unique because they specifically inquired as to whether CAM was provided by a physician, among other types of professionals. This dissertation defines …


Illness And The Treatment Response: The Patient's View, Nina Patricia Van Es May 1994

Illness And The Treatment Response: The Patient's View, Nina Patricia Van Es

Dissertations and Theses

In American society, where the biomedical profession is institutionalized and its therapies dominate health care, a decision to deviate from prevailing norms can be considered remarkable. Yet research done by Eisenberg et al. (1993) found that unconventional or alternative medicine had an "enormous presence" in U.S. health care and that one in three persons had utilized an unconventional therapy in 1990. The objective of this thesis was to explore this phenomenon. Individuals who had used alternative and biomedical intervention to treat a disorder were recruited through practitioners of alternative therapies. Through semi-structured interviews, case histories focusing on the illness trajectory …