Premium
Integrative medicine: more than the promotion of unproven treatments?
Author(s) -
Ernst Edzard
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/mja15.01239
Subject(s) - promotion (chess) , medicine , alternative medicine , traditional medicine , intensive care medicine , engineering ethics , psychology , political science , engineering , pathology , law , politics
Integrative medicine made its debut in the mid-1990s with the slogan “the best of both worlds”. A 2001 editorial in the British Medical Journal stated that “Integrated medicine (or integrative medicine as it is referred to in theUnited States) is practisingmedicine in a way that selectively incorporates elements of complementary and alternative medicine into comprehensive treatment plans alongside solidly orthodox methods of diagnosis and treatment.” The United States Academic Consortium for Integrative Medicine and Health and others have modified such descriptions, stressing that the modalities used must be “informed by evidence”. But why only “informed by” and not “based on” evidence? Have the advocates of integrative medicine perhaps realised that, in the latter case, the term would be synonymous with “evidencebased medicine” and thus largely superfluous?