TY - JOUR T1 - Complementary/alternative medicine: engulfed by postmodernism, anti-science and regressive thinking JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 298 LP - 301 DO - 10.3399/bjgp09X420482 VL - 59 IS - 561 AU - Edzard Ernst Y1 - 2009/04/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/59/561/298.abstract N2 - Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has become an important topic for public health. Its use is on the increase; in the US and Germany, for instance, about two-thirds of the general population now use CAM.1,2 Health authorities across the globe now feel the need to deal with the implications of such widespread use. More than half of all WHO member states now have a national office for CAM and 43% support an expert committee on the subject.3 This high level of attention seems justified but must be guided by clear thinking. Worryingly this is often not the case. In this article, I will attempt to clarify the confusions that CAM is often plagued by.PostmodernismPost-modern ideas have infiltrated CAM. Science's quest for truth is seen as a politically motivated ‘struggle for power’, in which the ‘societal approach is pitted against reductionism’.4,5 The claim is that ‘CAM poses huge challenges not only to the dominance of biomedicine, but also to the fruits of dominance – status and power in decision making about health care and the livelihood of physicians’6 or that CAM poses a ‘threat … to the long-standing hegemony of biomedicine in the West’.7 In order to fend off this threat, conventional medicine is said to ‘attack the medical competition, show no intellectual tolerance, and only take those prisoners, who can be converted’.4Anti-scienceMany enthusiasts of CAM are overtly antiscientific, believing that subjecting CAM to scientific testing misses the point and fails to account for its cultural diversity. Measuring Chinese philosophy with a ‘Western’ yardstick, for instance, is seen as a travesty to pluralism.8 Scientists, it is claimed, do not recognise that their own way of reasoning is not a value-free endeavour but culturally constructed and deeply embedded in … ER -