Official medicine and unconventional therapies: from conflict to integration?

Abstract

The distinction between official medicine and alternative medicine (also called unconventional medicine or complementary medicine) should be regarded, using a historical and epistemological standpoint, as a part of the everlasting confrontation of different medical and scientific paradigms. The demand of orientally-derived or anyhow extra-scientific medical practices is significantly increasing in all European countries and in the United States, raising a number of problems for health services and a number of deontologic, ethic and methodologic questions. The present crisis of western medicine stems from the trouble of reconciling the high-tech and molecular approach to disease, that is ruling over the entire modern medicine, with the individualization of the cure and with a good patient-doctor relationship, that are of particular importance in chronic and multifactorial illnesses. Unconventional medicine may contribute to fill up this methodological gap, that is essentially due to the prevailing of rationalistic thinking over the empirical thinking during the last centuries and especially during the last decades. The proper way to look at the phenomenon of the spreading of unconventional medicine is to examine its reasons, to recognize its possible distortions, and to exploit its potential advantages, in the light of the possible integration of different therapeutic approaches. No integration will be accomplished in the absence of rigorous scientific research and of a better qualification of medical operators.