New Books In Medicine

What makes for new science? What happens to the evidentiary basis of the medical profession when patients demand treatments beyond the range of their conception of human biology? Are the criteria of the sciences amenable to healing practices that are touted for their focus on singularity, rather than uniformity? Colleen Derkatch‘s Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2016) investigates how boundaries between traditional and novel are erected at the level of medical rhetoric. Derkatch analyzes both expert and popular literature on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM), an umbrella term designed to encompass homeopathy, meditation, naturopathy, and traditional Chinese medicine, among other things. Demand for alternative treatments by patients has produced an uncertain situation in which clinical frameworks are used for practices traditionally seen as being outside the realm of biomedicine. Through concerted engagement w