This book investigates scientific studies of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as episodes of scientific boundary work that shift, and then seek to fix, the boundaries between what counts as proper medical science and what does not. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric of science and medicine and science and technology studies, it shows how biomedicine itself responds to challenges both to its borders and its social and epistemic authority. Set against the backdrop of evidence-based medicine, it examines the rhetorical constituents of biomedical boundary work by analyzing a set of CAM ... More

This book investigates scientific studies of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as episodes of scientific boundary work that shift, and then seek to fix, the boundaries between what counts as proper medical science and what does not. Drawing on scholarship in rhetoric of science and medicine and science and technology studies, it shows how biomedicine itself responds to challenges both to its borders and its social and epistemic authority. Set against the backdrop of evidence-based medicine, it examines the rhetorical constituents of biomedical boundary work by analyzing a set of CAM-themed issues of the journals of the American Medical Association from 1998 and related textual artifacts. To answer the key question, “How does the notion of evidence determine the boundaries of biomedicine, from expert to public contexts?” the book examines the theme issues and related medical and public discourse to illuminate how members of a culturally dominant profession evaluate medical therapies in the face of disciplinary unrest, both within and beyond the borders of their profession. The chapters move from contexts internal to medicine to those external, mapping, sequentially, the historical-professional, epistemological, clinical, and popular dimensions of biomedical boundary work. The book provides a more nuanced, stratified account of the rhetorical negotiation of medical and scientific boundaries. Its main claim is that, despite the willingness of many medical researchers and practitioners to elide distinctions between mainstream and alternative medicine, this research on CAM, and its related activities (publication, clinical practice), ultimately strengthen those distinctions and expand science’s authority in medicine.