Biomedical Orthodoxy and Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Ethical Challenges of Integrating Medical Cultures

This paper examines biomedicine's contemporary overture to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the move toward an integrated medical system. The paper argues that a major challenge of our increasingly integrating medical culture is raising commensurate personnel to grapple with the changing ethical landscape, especially with regard to understanding the methodologies and philosophies of CAM's therapeutic paradigms. Such personnel is required to tackle realistically the critical ethical challenge of our amalgamating medical system, namely an acceptable framework for evaluating the efficacy of CAM's plural therapeutic paradigms.