ABSTRACT
Why might doctors want to work alongside practitioners trained in the unconventional ways of complementary medicine? Conventional medicinewhich is usually identified with biomedicine, the medicine of applied biology-has proven very effective with infection, in deficiency diseases, for problems amenable to surgery, acute pain, anaesthesia and life support. Unfortunately, it has made far less impact on the current epidemic diseases of the West. Stress-, environment-and lifestyle-mediated disease, addiction and psychological disorders seem to respond partially if at all. Nor does the biomedical model easily cope with ‘undifferentiated disease’, the ordinary kind of unwellness that affects all of us some of the time. And the complex though highly significant interaction of learning, behaviour and lifestyle is beyond its ken. Biomedicine gives an impression of concreteness and certainty, a sense that health can be reduced to biologically determinable elements. But day-to-day health care, far from having sure solutions to disease, is actually riven with uncertainties about causes and cures; its lively complexity is fully reflected in the ideas and beliefs people express about their own health problems and revealed in their attitudes to medicine. Not surprisingly it is in primary care, where people manage their own health problems or seek advice from a wide range of professionals, that complementary medicine is making its presence felt.
