ABSTRACT
The Research Council for Complementary Medicine (RCCM) was founded in 1983 to promote rigorous scientific research in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Research on CAM therefore requires different methods to conventional research. The word paradigm was often used: it was held that CAM had a different paradigm to conventional medicine and so should be researched in a different manner. One of the more authoritative of these was represented by the Nuffield Institute for Health, which in May 1995 published a report on research methodologies in relation to CAM that evaluated the state of debate and emphasized the need to choose more appropriate methodologies that are better suited to the particular nature of CAM therapies: the choice of the research design should be made on the basis of which methodology is most appropriate to researching the therapy under investigation. Biomedicine focus on disease in terms of biochemical processes and their breakdown, the emphasis on specific aetiology and the mind-body dualism.
