Complementary Medicine.

The notion of complementary medicine—the possibility that treatments not commonly employed or recognized by the allopathic medical profession might be combined with the conventional therapeutic armamentarium to balance and complete it—has appeared only recently. Before the 1990s, unconventional therapies were largely dismissed by the American medical profession as opposed to and incompatible with scientific medical practice. Even the term alternative, which has been used since the 1970s, would not have been acceptable to the allopathic practitioners of previous generations; it would have conferred too much respectability, implying that non-allopathic remedies might be an equal, if separate, option. Historically, the phrases preferred by mainstream physicians have been irregular medicine, fringe medicine, sectarian medicine, medical cultism, and quackery—all pejorative terms.

However, if our present willingness to think of alternative medicine as complementary signifies the opening of a new era, we can hardly expect to make a clean break with the past. The story of complementary medicine's years as despised alternative medicine is one of unceasing conflict with the medical establishment, during which an untold amount of bad feeling accumulated on both sides. If alternative medicine is to be enfranchised scientifically and professionally, if it is to become complementary in fact and not just in aspiration, this historical legacy of mutual ill will must be addressed and overcome.

An awareness of the historical development of complementary medicine is essential for understanding the philosophical orientation that binds together many alternative systems of practice. Whether an alternative system proclaims itself to be natural healing (the favored description in nineteenth-century parlance), drugless healing (the term popular during the early twentieth century), or holistic healing (the label since the 1970s), alternative medicine has consistently, from its beginnings in the late 1700s, seen itself as offering a distinctive approach to therapy and to physician–patient interactions. That distinctive outlook is drawn, ironically, from the work of the very same physician whom orthodox practitioners revere as the “father” of their medicine—Hippocrates. Complementary medical philosophy might thus be thought of as the Hippocratic heresy.