Alternative Health Care in Canada

Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Perspectives

Bibliographic Data

ID15024959
AuthorsN Rogers (0000-0002-8072-9525, corresponding author)
Year1999
Volume73
Issue2
Pages331-332
Publication date1999-06-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueBulletin of the history of medicine (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0007-5140 • E-ISSN: 1086-3176
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/bhm.1999.0048
OpenAlexW2026986878
LanguageEN
Citations received7

Reviewed by: Alternative Health Care in Canada: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Perspectives Naomi Rogers J. K. Crellin, R. R. Andersen, and J. T. H. Connor, comps. and eds.Alternative Health Care in Canada: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Perspectives. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 1997. viii + 279 pp. $Can. 27.95 (paperbound). Many teachers of North American medical students and college undergraduates have been at a loss to know how best to respond to the recent fascination with alternative medicine. Students, as potential consumers (or even future practitioners) of unorthodox healing, are seeking information and guidance through the medical arena that J. K. Crellin, R. R. Anderson, and J. T. H. Connor aptly characterize as “confusing in its variety” (p. 2). One in five Canadians, according to a 1990 study, has consulted an alternative practitioner. Moreover, Ontario’s Regulated Health Professions Act of 1992 legally recognized a number of nontraditional medical groups, and gave significant authority to lay citizens as members of councils overseeing the licensing of health-care professionals. To take unorthodox medical practices seriously (or at least to explore them within a scholarly framework) implies a political agenda, as this collection of Canadian sources demonstrates. Clearly intended as a course reader, the book is made up of short commentaries by the editors interspersed among scholarly articles and brief primary extracts (almost all from recent newspapers and medical journals). Tellingly—and somewhat at odds with the rest of the book—the final section presents the proper way to take a case history, with the directive: “medical practitioners need to be knowledgeable about the cultural/multicultural characteristics of the region in which they practice . . . and aware of general information about alternative modalities” (p. 266). [End Page 331] The editors say they hope to interest students, health-care practitioners, and policymakers, and that their aim is not to challenge “modern medicine” but to encourage “critical reflection about our health-care system” (p. 7). While this collection touches on the state, attitudes of the medically orthodox, herbs, naturopathy, and folk medicine, unfortunately it does not explore the ways in which alternative therapies and healers do and do not fit into the Canadian health-care system. What, for example, were the lobbying agendas that led to the shaping and passage of the 1992 Act? What elements of alternative medicine are taught in Canadian medical and other health-care training facilities? How does the integration of alternative practices actually work in physicians’ offices, hospitals, or clinics? Why, until 1968, was there a homeopathic representative on the Medical Council of Canada? The strongest contributions are the engaging reprinted historical and sociological pieces—especially the history of botanic groups by J. T. H. Connor, and Barbara Clow’s study of Mahlon Locke, a rural Ontario physician who in the 1920s and 1930s achieved great popularity with his foot-manipulation arthritis cure, and whom the Canadian medical establishment declined to challenge despite pressure from such United States reformers as Morris Fishbein. By choosing to avoid religious and ethical issues, the editors miss opportunities to focus on case studies that are briefly mentioned in the text—such as Jozef Krop, a licensed physician who was charged in 1995 by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario with professional misconduct for practicing “environmental medicine,” or the “environmental health” clinic in Halifax, Nova Scotia, that began receiving governmental support in 1995. Perhaps a section could have been structured around a chronic disease such as arthritis. Clow’s essay could have been paired with, say, an interview with a patient with chronic arthritis talking about his or her therapeutic choices. Readers could have been presented with information about typical orthodox therapies and concepts of the disease, and then offered the perspective of an alternative practitioner who deals with arthritic patients. Instead, the authors’ commentary narrows Clow’s larger points to a story about the orthodox profession’s response to the unorthodox, and asks “should licensed physicians who practice primarily alternative medicine be viewed as heretics or prophets?” (p. 112). We do not see the routine practice of alternative healers, whether in hospitals, patients’ homes, or practitioners’ offices. Further, the last decade of writings on gender and alternative groups is not reflected in

Health care · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Complementary and Alternative Medicine Studies · History · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Medical Research and Practices · Medicine

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