ABSTRACT
The development of the American health-care industry and the failure of efforts to tame or reform it are only part of the story. The organizing tactic that most fully characterized the major social movements of the 1960s was moral confrontation, which developed within the civil rights movement of the 1950s and influenced the style of many "liberation" campaigns thereafter. Despite occasional difficulties of implementation, they subscribed to a creed of democratic decision making and called their coordinating strategy "participatory democracy." During the 1960s, the most radical wing of the New Left, despairing that American institutions were reformable, had set up a self-conscious counterculture, which they hoped would demonstrate an alternative and superior way for people to live together. The holistic health movement emerged from the meeting of the various social liberation movements and the New Left and New Age countercultures, and was strongly influenced by the women's health movement.
