ABSTRACT
THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that popular interest in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in North America, not to mention other world regions, has grown during the 1990s. The studies of physician David Eisenberg and colleagues were the most prominent in a survey literature that drew attention to the size of expenditures, the scope of therapeutic utilization, and the growth in patient interest during the 1990s.1 CAM providers have also gained increasing access to insurance coverage and the protections of licensing.2 The U.S. government has responded to patients’ interest with dramatic increases in funding for research on CAM therapies as well as a comparatively open regulatory policy on food supplements under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. Popular magazines and Web sites on CAM therapies have proliferated, and the new politics of evidence-based medical integration has in some situations displaced the older politics of quack-busting and suppression. In short, the many changes that can be charted for the 1990s in the United States as well as other countries shore up a claim that there has been a “CAM revolution.”
