Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine / Edition 5

by Marc S. Micozzi MD, PhD

Overview

Practitioners like you have been turning to Micozzi’s comprehensive CAM text for the past 20 years. Filled with the most up-to-date information on scientific theory and research and updated contributions from world experts, Fundamentals of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 5th Edition gives you a solid foundation of the therapies and evidence-based clinical applications for CAM - and expands your global perspective with new and updated chapters on healing systems from around the world. Dive into interesting discussions on massage, manual therapies and bodywork, yoga, chiropractic, osteopathy, herbal medicine, aromatherapy and essential oils therapy, "nature cure," naturopathy and naturopathic medicine, and nutrition and hydration. With its wide range of topics, this 20th anniversary edition is your ideal CAM reference!

• A broad perspective traces CAM therapies from their beginnings to present day practices.

• Clinical guides for selecting therapies, and new advances for matching the appropriate therapy to the individual patient, enables you to offer and/or recommend individualized patient care.

• Expert contributors include well-known writers such as Kevin Ergil, Patch Adams, Joseph Pizzorno, and Marc Micozzi himself.

• A unique synthesis of information, including historical usage, cultural and social analysis, current basic science theory and research, and a wide range of clinical investigations and observations, makes this text a focused, authoritative resource.

• Suggested readings and references in each chapter list the best resources for further research and study.

• Coverage of CAM therapies and systems includes those most commonly encountered or growing in popularity, so you can carefully evaluate each treatment.

• An evidence-based approach focuses on treatments best supported by clinical trials and scientific evidence.

• Observations from mechanisms of action to evidence of clinical efficacy answers questions of how, why, and when CAM therapies work.

• Global coverage includes discussions of traditional healing arts from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

• NEW! Updated chapters feature new content and topics, including: challenges in integrative medicine, legal issues, CAM in the community, psychometric evaluation, placebo effect, stress management, and much more!

• NEW! Updated guides on common herbal remedies in clinical practice, East and Southeast Asia, and native North and South America deliver the latest information.

• NEW! Revised chapters with new contributors offer fresh perspectives on these important and relevant topics.

• EXPANDED! Basic science content and new theory and research studies cover a wide range of sciences such as biophysics, biology and ecology, ethnomedicine, psychometrics, neurosciences, and systems theory.

• NEW! New and expanded global ethnomedical systems include new content on Shamanism and Neo-Shamanism, Central and North Asia, Southeast Asia, Nepal and Tibet, Hawaii and South Pacific, Alaska and Pacific Northwest, and contemporary global healthcare.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455774074
Publisher:	Elsevier Health Sciences
Publication date:	12/18/2014
Pages:	720
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Micozzi, Marc S., MD, PhD (Univ of Pennsylvania)

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Characteristics of Complementary Medicine

The different medical systems subsumed under the category complementary and alternative are large and diverse, but these systems have some common ground in their views of health and healing. I call this overall philosophy a new ecology of health, sustainable medicine, or medicine for a small planet.

Allopathic medicine is considered the "scientific" healing art, whereas the alternatives are considered "nonscientific." However, perhaps what is needed is not less science but more sciences in the study of complementary and alternative medicine. Some of the central ideas of biomedicine are very powerful but are becoming intellectually stale. The study of dead tissue cells, components, and chemicals to understand life processes and the quest for "magic bullets" to combat disease are based on a reductionist, materialist view of health and healing. We have made tremendous advances over the past 100 years by applying these concepts to medicine. However, the resulting biomedical system is not always able to account for and use many observations in the realms of clinical and personal experience, natural law, and human spirituality.

contemporary biomedicine is a scientific paradigm with a particular history, as much influenced by social history as it is by scientific laws. In the laudable effort to make medicine scientific, we have emphasized that knowledge about the worldincluding nature and human nature-must be pursued by the following criteria: (1) objectivism-the observer is separate from the observed, (2) reductionism-complex phenomena are explainable in terms of simpler, component phenomena, (3) positivism-all information can be derived from physically measurable data, and (4) determinismphenomena can be predicted from a knowledge of scientific law and initial conditions. We all know that this is not the only way of "knowing" things but it has become the twentieth century test to determine whether such knowledge is "scientific." In fact, science simply requires empiricismmaking and testing models of reality by what can be observed, guided by certain values, and based on certain metaphysical assumptions. Science itself is not reality but a system of human knowledge. Scientists often detect differences between metaphysical reality and the scientific models constructed through human intellectual activity. These new thoughts about the nature of medicine do not represent a new science so much as they represent a new philosophy.

Therefore the aforementioned criteria are not always applicable. In the science of physics, objectivism is ultimately not possible at the fundamental level because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the act of observing phenomena necessarily influences the behavior of the phenomena being observed. Contemporary biological and ecological science has produced a wealth of observations about interactions between living organisms and their environments in transactional, multidirectional, and synergic ways that are not ultimately subject to reductionist explanations. For positivism and determinism to provide a complete explanation, we must assume that science has all the physical and intellectual tools to ask the right questions. However, the questions we ask are based on the history of science itself as part of the history of human intellectual inquiry.

Contemporary biomedicine conceptually uses Newtonian physics and pre-Darwinian biology. Newtonian physics explains and can reproduce many observations on the mechanics of everyday experience. Contemporary quantum physics (quantum mechanics) recognizes aspects of reality beyond Newtonian mechanics, such as matter-energy duality, "unified fields" of energy and matter, and wave functions (see Chapter 15). Quantum physics and contemporary biology-ecology may be needed to understand alternatives. Nuclear medicine uses the technology of contemporary physics but does not yet incorporate the concepts of quantum physics in its fundamental approach to patient health. Contemporary medicine does measure the body's energy using electrocardiography, electroencephalography, and electromyography for diagnostic purposes, but it does not enlist the body's energy for the purpose of healing.

The biomedical model relies on a projection of Newtonian mechanics into the microscopic and molecular realms.

As a model for everything, Newtonian mechanics has limitations. It works within the narrow limits of everyday experience. It does not always work at a macro (cosmic) level as shown by Einstein's theory of relativity or at a micro (fundamental) level as illustrated by quantum physics. However useful Newton's physics has been in solving mechanical problems, it cannot explain the vast preponderance of nature: the motion of currents; the growth of plants and animals; or the rise, functioning, and fall of civilizations. Per Bak once stated that mechanics could explain why the apple fell but not why the apple existed or why Newton was thinking about it in the first place.

Mechanics works in explaining machines. But no matter how popular this metaphor has become (with apologies to National Geographic's "incredible machine" imagery), the body is not a machine and it cannot be entirely explained by mechanics. It is becoming increasingly clear that an understanding of energetics is required. This duality between the mechanical and the energetic has been accepted in physics for most of the past century. This duality is famously illustrated by the fact that J.J. Thomson won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that the electron is a particle. His son, George P. Thomson, won the Nobel Prize a generation later for demonstrating that the electron is a wave.

"Hard scientists" such as physicists and molecular biologists accept the duality of the electron but have a hard time accepting the duality of the human body. The "soft sciences," which attempt to be inclusive in their study of the phenomena of life and nature, are often looked on with disdain according to the folklore of the self-styled real scientists. However, real science must account for all of what is observed in nature, not just the conveniently reductionistic part.

The biological science of contemporary medicine is essentially pre-Darwinian in that it emphasizes typology rather than individuality and variation. Each patient is defined as a clinical entity by a diagnosis, with treatment prescribed accordingly. The modern understanding of the human genome does not make this approach to biomedical science less preDarwinian. Both the fundamentals of inheritance (Mendel) and natural selection (Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace) were explained long before the discovery of the structure of the gene itself. Although modern biology-ecology continues to explore the phenomena of how living systems interact at the level of the whole-which cannot be seen under a microscope or in a test tube-molecular genetics continues to dissect the human genome.

It may seem outrageously complex to construct a medical system based on the concepts of modern physics and biology-ecology while maintaining a unique diagnostic and therapeutic approach to each individual. This would indeed be complex if not for the fact that the body is its own entity, a part of nature, and each body has an innate ability to heal itself.

f biomedicine cannot explain scientific obser varions of alternatives, the biomedical para- digm will be revised.

One way of studying and understanding alternative medicine is to view it in light of contemporary physics and biology-ecology and to focus not just on the subtle manipulations of the alternative practitioners but on the physiological response of the body. When homeopathy or acupuncture is observed to result in a physiological or clinical response that cannot be explained by the biomedical model, it is not the role of the scientist to deny this reality but rather to modify our explanatory models to account for it. In this way science itself progresses. In the end there is only one reality. Alternative medical systems, which are relatively old in terms of human intellectual hi tory, always have been trying to describe, understan and work with the same reality of health and healir as biomedicine. Furthermore, whereas contemporary biomedicine uses new technologies in the service relatively old ideas about health and healing, altern tive methods use old technologies whose fundamental tal character may reflect new scientific ideas on phy ical and biological nature (Box 1-1).

Science must account for all of what is observe not just part of it. That is why physics has moved b

A Note About Nomenclature

The word alternative, or the term complementary and alternative medicine, now seems to be culturally encoded in the English language. Workers at Harvard Medical School have provided a basis for a functional definition of the term:

Alternative medicine refers to those practices explicitly used for the purpose of medical intervention, health promotion or disease prevention which are not routinely taught at U.S. medical schools nor routinely underwritten by third-party payers within the existing U.S. health care system.

The Harvard definition seems to be a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning that alternative medicine is everything not being presently promoted in mainstream medicine. This definition may remind us of a popular song from the 1960s called, "The Element Song," which offers a complete listing of all the different elements of the periodic table (set to the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance). It ends with words to this effect: "These are the many elements we've heard about at Harvard. And if we haven't heard of them, they haven't been disco-vard." I have likened the recent "discovery" of alternative medicine to Columbus's discovery of the Americas. Although his voyage was a great feat that expanded the intellectual frontiers of Europe, Columbus could not really discover a world already known to millions of indigenous peoples who used complex systems of social organization and subsistence activities. Likewise, the definitional statement that alternatives are not "within the existing U.S. health care system" is a curious observation for the millions of Americans who routinely use them today...

Table of Contents

SECTION ONE: FOUNDATIONS 1.Characteristics of Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2.Translation from Conventional Medicine 3.Issues and Challenges in Integrative Medicine 4.Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the Community 5.Social and Cultural Factors in Medicine

SECTION TWO: MIND, BODY, AND SPIRIT 6.Vitalism 7.Mind-Body Thought and Practice: Great Britain to Early and Late America 8.Neurohumoral Physiology and Psychoneuroimmunology 9.Mind-Body Sciences and the Placebo Effect 10.Mind-Body Therapies, Stress Reduction, and Pyschometrics 11.Prayer, Religion, and Spirituality 12.Creative and Expressive Arts Therapies 13.Humor

SECTION THREE: ENERGETICS, MANUAL HEALING AND YOGA 14.Energy Medicine 15.Biophysics: Electricity, Light, Magnetism, and Sound 16.Principles and Bodywork and Manual Healing 17.Massage, Bodywork, and Touch Therapies 18.Osteopathy 19.Chiropractic 20.Reflexology 21.Yoga

SECTION FOUR: NATURAL AND ALTERNATIVE WESTERN THERAPIES 22.Nature Cure, Naturopathy, and Natural Medicines 23.Contemporary Naturopathic Medicine 24.Ethnobotany and Western Herbalism 25.Aromatherapy and Plant Essential Oils 26.Nutrition, Hydration, and Diet Therapies 27.Ecological Pharmacology: Molecular Biology to Systems Theory

SECTION FIVE: GLOBAL ETHNOMEDICAL SYSTEMS: ASIA AND THE MIDDLE EAST 28.Traditional Medicine of China and East Asia 29.Classical Acupuncture 30.Traditional Medicine of India: Ayurveda and Siddha 31.Tibetan Medicine 32.Unani Medicine 33.Sufism and Healing in the Middle East

SECTION SIX: GLOBAL ETHONOMEDICAL SYSTEMS: AFRICA, AMERICAS, AND THE PACIFIC 34.Traditional Medicine: Ethnomedicine, Shamanism, and Origins 35.Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Indonesia, Indochina, and Vietnam 36.Blending of Chinese, Ayurvedic, Islamic, and Shamanic Healing: Burma, Thailand, and Nepal 37.Native North American Healing and Herbal Remedies 38.Central and South American Healing and Herbal Remedies 39.Latin American Curanderismo 40.Hawaii, South Pacific and Philippine Islands; Alaska and Pacific Northwest 41.African Healing and Becoming a Traditional Healer 42.Magico-Religious Traditions and Neo-Shamanism 43. Modern Asia, Africa, Americas, and the Pacific

What People are Saying About This

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The most trusted source in CAM therapies and clinical applications for the past 20 years

Editorial Reviews

Reviewer: Mary M Tuchscherer, MSc, DC, PhD (Northwestern Health Sciences University)
Description: This book details traditional healing methods from around the world and presents them in the context of Western medical healthcare practice. The authors include scientific evidence where appropriate and offer cultural context where necessary, so readers can better understand the methodology of the more esoteric healing traditions. This updates and expands the 2010 edition to include additional scientific evidence supporting complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as well as additional discussion of African, Southeast Asian, and Native American traditions.
Purpose: The purpose is to provide an authoritative, descriptive, and integrative appraisal of the various healing traditions and healthcare models from around the world. These traditions, the scientific models, and cultural contexts are discussed by well-credentialed experts in the various fields; indeed, there are 37 contributors and four primary authors. Critical appraisals are made from the vantage point of Western science, but more than this, a cultural awareness and context is brought to bear on the various traditions. This consciously encourages Western medical practitioners to understand and accept the rationale for integrating CAM and traditional methods of healing with their own methods.
Audience: This is intended for students of Western medicine and any practitioners of the healing arts wishing to understand the many other forms of healing and the various contexts in which health and disease are managed throughout the world. The authors are uniquely qualified to discuss and assess the methodologies and healing traditions. They are experts in healing themselves and have vast expertise in their various disciplines. Fortunately, the thorough and broadminded assessment of the traditional healing methods provided by these experts has strengthened the stock of CAM methods in the eyes of many skeptical practitioners.
Features: The six sections begin with an interesting and well-researched introduction to CAM in the U.S., which includes defining terminology and explaining the consistency of its use. Interestingly, the social, cultural, and economic challenges and realities of medical/healthcare in both industrialized and nonindustrialized countries are discussed. The authors and their contributors detail useful scientific concepts that are helpful in giving context and foundation to the understanding of energy healing and the more esoteric forms of traditional healing. One of the most interesting features of the book is the section on the variety of healing traditions from Africa, Southeast Asia, and Native American practices. While not meant to be exhaustive, these chapters create interest and a good foundation to encourage further study. The web-based resources allow for unique learning experiences with a variety of topics. There are not many illustrations or pictures in the book, and the diagrams are in two-tone color. (As a teacher in the field of chiropractic science, I noted that the references in the chiropractic chapter are dated. The referenced science is also outdated and incomplete. Several of the most recent peer-reviewed journal articles are not included. Because this chapter in particular was not well referenced, it caused me to question how well the other areas in which I am not an expert were referenced. However, this is not an indictment of the book.)
Assessment: Overall, this book admirably meets its goal of providing a reference to CAM, as well as context for the various forms of healing practiced around the world. It sheds light on the reality that Western medicine is not the only way to keep the global population on a path towards health. Indeed, the authors make an excellent case for the appropriate use of conservative models of care in an integrated setting.

Doody's Review Service

"The book offers detailed descriptions of various tradition-based and speculation-based modalities for healing."

FACT, December 2010

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