In a research-focused issue of EJOM ten years ago David St George, epidemiologist and outspoken champion of alternative medicine, declared that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) should avoid biomedical agendas and instead do their own research. He rated orthodox medicine’s methods as over-quantitative, insufficiently tuned to the subjective experiences of patients and practitioners, blind to healing phenomena based on vital forces, and in any case the servants of an establishment whose main interest in CAM is to swallow the bits it finds attractive and spit out the rest (St George, 2000). In the same EJOM issue Scheid and Bensky chided Fitter (and to some degree all of us) for ‘Orientalism’ (re-shaping Chinese medicine in order to assimilate it into Western culture) when he suggested that Chinese medicine should be grounded in contemporary culture and make use of a range of Western research methods (Scheid and Bensky, 2000). Fitter was not advocating the ‘hard evidence’ end of the research spectrum: he had focused particularly on approaches used in psychology and the various forms of reflective practice (Fitter, 2000).
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