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The presentation of complementary and alternative medicine ...
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Short Description: alternative medicine (CAM) therapies because these are not as strictly regulated ..... untried; and alternative medicine is more compatible with patients’ ...
Content Inside: Pamela J. McKenzie and Tami Oliphant Faculty of Information and Media Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario N6A 5B7 The presentation of complementary and alternative medicine information in Canadian midwifery care Abstract: This paper uses discourse analysis to consider midwives' and pregnant women's discussions of conventional and complementary and alternative medicine interventions for inducing labour. Participants distinguished between "natural" and "medical" methods and used information sources based on both biomedical evidence and women's experience to justify and challenge authority claims. Résumé : Cet article utilise l'analyse du discours pour examiner les conversations des sages- femmes et des femmes enceintes au sujet des interventions en médecine traditionnelle, douce et alternative pour assister l'accouchement. Les participantes ont fait la distinction entre les méthodes « naturelles » et « médicales » et ont utilisé des sources d'information basées aussi bien sur les évidences biomédicales que sur l'expérience de femme pour justifier et remettre en question les autorités concernées. 1. Introduction This paper analyzes interactions between information providers and users in a specific community. We use discourse analytic techniques (Potter 1996, Wetherell and Taylor 2001) to provide insight into the ways that midwives and their clients seek and provide information about alternative health care interventions. Despite the findings that most patients would prefer to receive their health information from a doctor (Williamson 1998), physicians may ignore or dismiss complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies because these are not as strictly regulated as allopathic therapies (in Canada, for example, there was very little regulation of the industry until the Natural Health Products Regulations passed in January 2004), many CAM products or practices lack empirical evidence to support beneficial claims or have shown to be ineffective in clinical trials (Dwyer 2004), and physicians may be uneducated about CAM therapies and therefore uncomfortable about discussing them with patients (Windslow and Shapiro 2002). Furthermore, studies of patient-health practitioner communication show that patients typically do not disclose CAM use to their conventional medical providers and that clinicians do not typically ask about CAM use. In a systematic review of the literature Robinson and McGrail (2004) found that the rate of non-disclosure of CAM use to health practitioners was as high as 77% in some cases. The primary reasons for non- disclosure cited by patients were concerns about a negative response, the belief that the practitioner did not need to know about CAM use, and that the practitioner did not ask. However, other studies have shown that when patients view their practitioner as using participatory styles, they are more likely to divulge CAM use (Sleath et al. 2005). 1
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