Objectives: The aim of this article is to analyze the development of integrative oncology from a bibliometric point of view. The publication and citation patterns of publications are analyzed and their contents mapped.
Design: This study is based on bibliometric methods. The data sets consist of 7 025 respectively 4 990 publications over the time period 1966-2016, shown in PubMed and Web of Science.
Results: The expansion of the numbers of these publications took place in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Research is dominated by authors located in the USA, China and Germany who are working at well-established research universities and university hospitals. The clinical share of publications is relatively small, and few studies are classified according to clinical phase. Content analysis revealed that much of the clinical research is based on surveys, and that content reflects the intersection of complementary therapies and cancer research. The latter aspect is less obvious in pre-clinical research. The most frequent journals in the material show a focus on complementary and alternative therapies or on integrative oncology, although journals focused on oncology or general/internal medicine were well-represented in the material as a whole. The most-cited publications were review articles and surveys.
Conclusions: Integrative oncology has been established as a small, but distinct, research domain. There are several signs of specialization in integrative oncology, but also in its integration into general medical and oncological research.
Even if integrative and complementary medicine (ICM) is a growing scientific field, it is also a highly contested area in terms of scientific legitimacy. The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of ICM research in scientific journals. Is this kind of research acknowledged outside the ICM context, for example, in general or specialized medicine? What is the impact of ICM research? and Is it possible to identify any shift in content, from the original ICM research to the documents where it is acknowledged? The material consisted of two sets: documents published in 12 ICM journals in 2007; and all documents citing these documents during the years 2007-2012. These sets were analyzed with help from citation and co-word analysis. When analyzing the citation pattern, it was clear that a majority of the cited documents were acknowledged in journals and documents that could be related to research areas outside the ICM context, such as pharmacology & pharmacy and plant science-even if the most frequent singular journals and subject categories were connected to ICM. However, after analyzing the content of cited and citing documents, it was striking how similar the content was. It was also evident that much of this research was related to basic preclinical research, in fields such as cell biology, plant pharmacology, and animal experiments.
Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is not only increasinglypopular and frequently used in Western societies, it is also a growing scientificfield. But how are results from clinical CAM studies received and representedby other researchers? This article discusses the migration and representationof three clinical CAM studies, published in high-impact medical journals, analyzedwith help from quantitative and qualitative citation context analysis. Theresults indicate a great variety concerning the migration of results and thatthis kind of research is subject to different kinds of boundary work, especiallyconcerning biomedical standards and design of the studies.
In this chapter, the political understanding—or translation—of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is analysed within the context of the Swedish parliament. This is achieved with help from an actor network approach, using motions written by parliamentary politicians during the time period 1980–2015. The main findings suggest that there are two types of translations. The first is focused on public health issues in which CAM is presented as a potential contribution to problems such as long-term sick leaves. The second is focused on more specific CAM issues, such as legal constraints and lack of knowledge, which might delimit the use and practice of CAM. In general, the debate is in favour of CAM and is dominated by liberal and conservative parties. It is also dominated by ideals of freedom of choice and free markets, although ideals of social justice also are recurrent. Another finding is that the political understanding of CAM follows scientific and medical norms.
In this article we analyse how research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) break through into one established scientific arena, namely academic journals. With help from bibliometric methods we analyse publication of CAM articles, in the Medline database, during the period 1966–2007. We also analyse the general content of the articles and in what journals they get published. We conclude that the publication activity of CAM articles increases rapidly, especially in the late 1990s, and that the changing growth rate is not due to the general expansion of Medline. The character of CAM articles has changed towards more clinical oriented research, especially in subfields such as acupuncture and musculoskeletal manipulations. CAM articles are found both in core clinical journals and in specialized CAM journals. Even though a substantial part of the articles are published in CAM journals, we conclude that the increasing publication activity is not restricted to the expansion of these specialized journals.
The aim of this article is to analyze the development of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as a research domain over the period 1966-2016. Using bibliometric methods, the publication pattern will be analyzed with a focus on journal articles and sources. Furthermore, we will analyze the development of clinical research and map the general content of the publications. The data set consist of 105 216 publications, that have Complementary Therapies as their MeSH major topic, in the Medline database. The expansion of CAM research took place in the late 1990s. At the end of the time period about 20 percent of the publications were classified as clinical trials, but relatively few according to clinical phase. A majority of the core journals, defined by the Bradford law of scattering, showed a focus on CAM. The impact of these journals, measured by SNIP values, were close to the average. The analysis of MeSH terms revealed that the dominating therapies were Muscoskeletal manipulations, Acupuncture Therapy and Mind Body Therapies. The co-word analysis of author keywords showed that Acupuncture were the largest single node. Furthermore, it was possible to detect a specific CAM cluster. CAM has developed to a small but distinct research domain. There are signs of specialization in/about CAM as well as integration in other medical sub-fields. Furthermore, there are signs of a young medical domain, characterized by small and exploratory clinical studies.
Aim: The aim of this study is to analyse the development of Scandinavian research on complementary and alternative medicine in terms of publication pattern and general content. Furthermore we will map research networks.
Methods and data: This study is based on bibliometric methods. The dataset consists of 1441 publications with at least one author with a Scandinavian address and/or organisational affiliation, from 2005–2017, in Medline and Web of Science.
Results and conclusions: Complementary and alternative medicine is a small and moderately growing research field in Scandinavia, with an average of 120 publications per year. The largest sub-term is integrative and complementary medicine, but the majority of documents are classified as other medical sub-fields. A similar pattern is found regarding the sources. The Medical Subject Heading classifications of the documents and the author keywords indicate that much of the relevant research takes a general focus on complementary and alternative medicine. Regarding specific therapies, mind-body and sensory art therapies are particularly prominent in the material. Various aspects of pain, mental health and gynaecology are recurrent health issues. In total, 31.5% of the publications are classified as clinical trials. The organisations referenced most frequently in the material are Karolinska Institutet and UiT Tromsö and it is clear the research is based at large universities and university hospitals. The research networks have relatively different profiles and collaborate with both Scandinavian and international organisations.
In recent years, Sweden has witnessed a rise in criminal activity, notably in organized crime, gang violence, and incidents like shootings and explosions. This trend has sparked considerable political and media debates, in Sweden and internationally. This paper analyses how the Swedish police authority comprehend the situation discursively. How do they define their role and mission in society? What problems do they identify? What goals and strategies do they propose, and what values are attached to these? This is illustrated by policy documents and website materials from the police authority. The results show three main problematizations: crime and crime fighting, working within the police organization, and relations between the police and citizens. Key findings are that the police authority represents crimes and the role of the police in different ways depending on what type of crime discussed, and that they connect various aspects of police work to non-repressive values, such as trust and safety.
What counts as knowledge and expertise and how these are produced, afforded authority to underpin practice—in diverse health-related settings—is a theme explored in many of the books published in the HTS Series. Extracts from four books help us to understand how knowledge and associated evidence claims are produced, how they gain value yet are often contested, and how they shape the framing of the meaning of (ill) health by diverse actors, and what is to count as its management and treatment. The four books are:
Brosnan et al. (Eds.) (Complementary and alternative medicine. Exploring health and technology through personal medical devices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) challenge the assumption that complementary and alternative medicine is outside of conventional biomedical orthodoxy to show how it has been incorporated into biomedical and its knowledge production.
Michael and Rosengarten (Innovation and biomedicine. Ethics, evidence and expectation in HIV. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) focus on the development and testing through a randomised control trial (RCT) of a drug to treat HIV.
Sleeboom-Faulkner (Global morality and life science practices in Asia. Assemblages of life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) takes us into the related but much broader area of biotechnology, especially in regard to genetic testing and biobanks, in China, India, and Japan.
Mesman (Uncertainty and medical innovation: Experienced pioneers in neonatal care. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) examines how staff on a neonatal intensive care intervene differently in the constitution of knowledge and how this may lead to frictions in the decisions about responsibility, timing, and end of life.
This book examines how complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) – as knowledge, philosophy and practice – is constituted by, and transformed through, broader social developments. Shifting the sociological focus away from CAM as a stable entity that elicits perceptions and experiences, chapters explore the forms that CAM takes in different settings, how global social transformations elicit varieties of CAM, and how CAM philosophies and practices are co-produced in the context of social change. Through engagement with frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), CAM is reconceptualised as a set of practices and knowledge-making processes, and opened up to new forms of analysis. Part 1 of the book explores how and why boundaries within CAM and between CAM and other health practices, are being constructed, challenged and changed. Part 2 asks how CAM as material practice is shaped by politics and regulation in a range of national settings. Part 3 examines how evidence is being produced and used in CAM research and practice. Including studies of CAM in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and North and South America, the volume will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and health practitioners.
This introduction proposes new directions for the social science of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). It firstly reviews trends and gaps in the sociology of CAM, which has largely focussed on issues related to motivations for use, professionalisation struggles, and CAM’s relationship to biomedicine. CAM is more often treated as a signifier of social change than as a set of practices shaped by, and implicated in, epistemic and social transformations. By drawing on approaches from Science and Technology Studies (STS)—including actor-network theory and theories of boundary work, social worlds, co-production, and epistemic cultures—the chapter calls attention to CAM’s contingency, situatedness, materiality, and co-production within various spheres of governance and knowledge production. Such perspectives, it is argued, offer fruitful ways of comprehending what CAM is and how and why it is evolving.
Background: Recent studies indicate increased use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in western societies, to ameliorate health problems. Even if there is substantial research on general patterns of use, there is limited knowledge on individual motives. This study contributes to a qualitative understanding of experiences of choosing and using CAM. Design and methods: This study consists of in-depth interviews with 10 CAM users in Sweden. The participants represent different backgrounds and experiences of using CAM. The interviews have been analysed in accordance with content analysis. Results: In analysing experiences of choosing and using CAM four main themes were identified: frustration and critique, values and ideology, individual responsibility, and combining treatments. In general, the participants were highly reflexive on issues concerning their health. They highlighted their own role and responsibility, combined a variety of treatments, and continuously dealt with questions on risks, even if they had relatively different approaches to if and when to use CAM. The results also show that motives may change over time. Even if initial choices were closely related to frustration and critique of conventional treatments (for example, by perceiving conventional health care as limited, not receiving proper diagnoses, or being critical to conventional drugs) was long-term use motivated by ideological characteristics of CAM (such as holistic and individualized treatments, and extensive interaction with practitioners). Conclusions: Four main themes, concerning experiences of choosing and using CAM were identified. This study also supports the idea that initial motives for choosing CAM may differ from those explaining long-term use.
PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to examine how users of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) experience various forms of treatments, form knowledge about them, and understand the boundaries between CAM and conventional health care.
METHOD: Semistructured qualitative interviews, with 10 CAM users in Sweden, analyzed with qualitative content analysis and quantitative network analysis, and subsequent network visualizations.
FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION: The main findings stressed the importance to CAM users of bodies and physical experiences, both in experiencing and forming knowledge about treatments. Physical experience was often contrasted with theoretical understanding. Another key finding was that the CAM users seemed to set up different standards for conventional and public health care and CAM. Although scientific explanations were considered as generally important for legitimacy, and conventional health care was expected to be evidence based, they were less important to personal use and in the use of CAM. In these cases, firsthand experience of positive effects were decisive.
Objectives: The present study was initiated to determine consultations with health care providers and use of self-management strategies for prevention or treatment of COVID-19 related symptoms in countries with a full lockdown (Norway), a partial lockdown (the Netherlands) and no lockdown (Sweden) during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and if such use correlates with worries of being infected by COVID-19 disease.
Design: Data were collected in collaboration with Ipsos A/S in April-June 2020. An adapted version of the International Questionnaire to measure use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (I-CAM-Q) was used with the categories “for prevention of COVID-19” and “to treat COVID-19-related symptoms” added. Data were collected among a representative sample in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands using data assisted telephone interviews (Norway, n=990 and Sweden, n=500), and an online survey (the Netherlands, n=1004). Total response rate was 30%.
Results: Very few consulted a health care provider with the intention to treat or prevent COVID-19 (1.2% and 1.0% respectively) with medical doctors mostly visited (1.0% and 0.9% respectively). Similarly, the use of self-management strategies to prevent or treat COVID-19 was low (3.4% and 0.2% respectively); most commonly used for prevention of COVID-19 were vitamins and minerals (2.8%). Consultations with health care providers and use of self-management strategies for prevention of COVID-19 were positively associated with worries of being infected with COVID-19.
Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic does not seem to have evoked a large-scale difference in behavior related to consultations with health care providers or the use of self-management strategies in any of the three countries.