Complementary and Alternative Medicine Essay example -- Health, Medici

Introduction In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in complementary medicine, and indeed alternative medicine (Lee-Treweek 2002, Andrews 2004, Barry 2006). Moreover the number of professionally trained therapist and practitioners has increased giving the patient/client a better choice and at more competitive rates (Smallwood, 2005). In this essay a critical assessment of the view that ‘patients use of complementary and alternative medicine, can be understood as part of the individualisation of responsibility for health’ will be made and argued, that there are many aspects which influence the uptake of such therapies. Responsibility for health has changed and this will be discussed by examples of sociological theories. Medical sociologists have been previously concerned with illness rather than health. Functionalists such as Parsons (1951) suggested illness was a deviance and had the effect of disruption on society which had to be controlled. He used the sick note to illustrate that the sick person was excused from performing normally, but this had to be kept to a minimum and the sick person had to want to get better. The function of the medical profession was to socially control the use of the sick note to those genuinely sick (Webb, Westergaard, 2004). However in today society the working pers on aims to keep working during some illnesses or at least limit the time spent away from work. To do this it involves taking some responsibility for keeping healthy and reducing the time actually being ill. Therefore by choosing to use CAM and alternative medicine, it could provide an additional method which may combat illness and help speed up recovery (Lett, 2000). 08015960 Possible reasons why patient/clie... ...t approach of dictating the direction the Nation Health Service should follow. This caused a vast change in how services were delivered, with cost influencing many decisions. Clinical governance emerged in the late 1990’s when New Labour took power, and evidence based practise became the norm. Netteleton (2010) likens clinical governance to Foucault’s term of ‘governmentality’ whereby collective objectives are kept in check. Evidence- based practise is an aspect that has been the most difficult for CAM and alternative practises to combine with, as measuring and gathering quality evidence is difficult to obtain. The integration into conventional health care will depend upon finding a balance between the two disciplines. However if individualism proves to favour CAM and alternative methods then social pressure may yield quicker than the academic struggle.