INTRODUCTION

OVER THE PAST DECADE, alternative medical therapies have played an increasingly prominent role in American health care. In the nation’s grocery stores, homeopathic treatments and over-thecounter herbal remedies crowd aisles that were once largely devoted to analgesics, sore throat lozenges, and fruit-flavored, animal-shaped children’s vitamins. Eager to fill their beds and their coffers, hospitals advertise-even celebrate-the inclusion of nontraditional medical practices. Medical schools, too, embrace this development with curricular reforms aimed at teaching prospective physicians about alternative forms of healing. With attention turning toward a range of mind-body and holistic treatments, health care in the United States seems more full of variety than has been the case since the establishment of modern medical authority in the early 1900s. Indeed, the emergence in the medical lexicon of a well-recognized acronym, CAM (for “complementary and alternative medicine”), is suggestive of how these alternatives are becoming a visible, and increasingly significant, current within the medical mainstream.