ABSTRACT
Several trends have contributed to popularity of Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), in spite of its rejection by mainstream science. The resurgence of folk medicine can be traced, in large part, to nostalgic holdovers from the neo-romantic search for simplicity and spirituality that permeated the ‘counterculture’ of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of CAM’s treatments, while unable to affect the disease itself, do make the illness more bearable, but for psychologic reasons. Psychologists have long been aware that people generally strive to make their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors conform to a harmonious whole. Potential clients should ask whether any alternative treatment they are considering is supported by research published in biomedical journals whose peer-review processes strive to eliminate experimental artifacts that lead to false impressions of cures. Even then, because any single finding could always be due to an undetected confounding variable or a statistical fluke, independent replication is essential.
