The Role of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Accommodating Pluralism

Hastings Center Studies in Ethics Series

Daniel Callahan
(Georgetown University Press, 2004)

Alternative and complementary medicine are widely embraced in American society, estimated to be used by 40% of the population. Moreover, the more educated people are the more likely they are to use it. Yet for many in mainline American medicine, alternative medicine is often looked upon with great skepticism and sometimes outright hostility, said to lack the scientific grounding necessary for good medicine. This book is an attempt to look closely at the controversy, with a particular focus on the kind of methodologies necessary to assess it. It no less attempts to ask, in the face of disagreement and in the name of pluralism, what role it should have in health care.

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