CAM definition creep…
The latest Commentary in Canadian Family Physician “Irritable bowel syndrome: Are complementary and alternative medicine treatments useful?” makes the point:
We must keep an open mind about potential new treatments, regardless of whether they are CAM approaches or not. That does not mean, however, that we should not look for evidence of effectiveness of these new treatments.
As they say, don’t keep your mind so open that your brains fall out.
The author quotes things like fibre (but only soluble kinds) and peppermint oil as CAM therapies that may work for IBS, and points to some evidence for this assertion.
Great! But… just because these things are herbs/supplements, why are they labelled as CAM? Fibre, similar to other often CAM-labelled therapies like vitamins, has as far as I know been one of the things MDs have been perscribing for bowel issues for a while. And for specific indications, a lot of such drugs – because they are drugs – have reasonable evidence.
By applying the “CAM” label to such actual evidence-based therapies, we are lending legitimacy to definite “alternative” (i.e. woo) approaches like homeopathy, reiki, and acupuncture, which have no credible evidence behind them (and likely never will since they are based on assumptions about the world and its properties that are contrary to everything modern science has shown to be true). For these types of extraordinary claims, keeping an “open mind”, in the absence of extraordinary evidence, is a waste of time.
As others have said – Complementary and Alternative Medicine as a term is a load of BS:
There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not, medicine that works and medicine that may or may not work
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