Moving Forward? Complementary and Alternative Medicine Practitioners Seek Regulation

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Self-regulatory status, with some degree of social closure, does not guarantee cultural legitimacy. Chiropractors

are a good example of this. In other work, we examine the relationship between statutory self-regulation and cultural
legitimacy. Because of the stress placed on statutory self-regulation by the practitioners in our focus group, we focus
on that.

2. In Canada, which has a publicly funded health care system (covers medical doctors and hospitals),

regulation of health practitioners is a provincial responsibility (Casey 1999; Boon and Verhoef

2001). While a few CAM practitioner groups are currently regulated in certain provinces, most are
not regulated at all. Indeed, some groups are not even interested. The only CAM group that is
regulated in every province is chiropractic.

CAM leaders often spoke of “double-blind scientific studies” when referring to RCT studies. They also used the

term “clinical evidence” to refer to observational studies of their clients or others. The use and misuse of
terminology for studies, although beyond the scope of our current analysis, also supports our notion that science is at
the center of the demarcation of boundaries for CAM groups.

The leaders can be categorized into two groups according to their view of how acupuncture

should be practised. One group sees the practice of acupuncture as an inherent part of TCM and
its theoretical underpinnings. The other group regards acupuncture as a treatment modality in its
own right that is useful to a range of health care providers, including western medical doctors,
dentist and nurses. Complicating this fundamental division are language barriers and cultural
differences. Practitioners in the first group tend to have trained in China and speak Chinese as
their first language. Most of the practitioners in the second group were born in Canada and
educated at Canadian acupuncture schools.