engleski

From Ignorance to Stigmatization: Changing Faces of Medical Pluralism

Different forms and types of alternative and complementary medicine have become an unavoidable item on offer on Western health care markets and a part of everyday cultural practice. Shops, products, schools and practices of different forms of alternative medicine have been present for a couple of last decades in the majority of European cities. One of the largest quantitative researches of complementary and alternative medicine use was done in the US (Eisenberg et al 1990, 1997, 2001) and according to it in the period from 1990 to 1997 the number of complementary and alternative medicine users rose for almost 50% ; according to another research from 2001 (Eisenberg et al 2001), it turned out that the percentage of population using CAM (including those who used different methods for prevention of disease and improving quality of life) rose to almost 70% of all of the adult population of the USA! The situation is quite similar in Europe and according to the official WHO data for several European countries from the end of the 1900ies show that roughly 20-30% of the population of Western European countries have used different forms of CAM while 70-80% of population are interested in the possibility that their health insurance covers some forms of alternative medicine (Gazdić, Berce-Bratko, Šinkovec:2002). The above-described phenomenon of co-existence of several therapeutic practices which patients (clients) can chose freely, defined as medical pluralism, is today considered to be the dominant characteristic of medical reality in the majority of the world countries (Leslie 1976, Helman 1984, Kleinman 1980, Benoist 1996, Hsu 1999, Krausse 2006).

medical pluralism

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