Interesting facts about alternative medicine in America

In the autumn of 1994, a New Yorker cartoonist imagined a clinical scene
in which a patient who is literally radiant with health, his body throwing
off a nearly blinding aura of wellness, is nevertheless being sternly admonished
by his physician because he has achieved his health the wrong way:
“You’ve been fooling around with alternative medicines, haven’t you?” the
doctor scolds.1
New Yorker cartoons constitute the most sensitive of barometers to shifting
currents in America’s cultural atmosphere. And in truth, whatever one
chooses to call it—alternative medicine, unconventional medicine, holistic
medicine, complementary medicine, integrative medicine (some even like the
term vernacular medicine)—a lot of people have been fooling around with
unorthodox forms of therapy in recent years. In a now legendary survey
published in 1993, Harvard’s David Eisenberg reported that one in three
Americans had used one or more forms of alternative medicine in 1990, and
expressed surprise at the “enormous presence” of healing alternatives in American
society. When Eisenberg and colleagues repeated the survey in 1997,
furthermore, they found that “alternative medicine use and expenditures have
increased dramatically” since the first study: now 40 percent of the population
employed such procedures