ISBN: 9780335220120

This book, aimed at postgraduates and healthcare professionals and academics, is the first ever work to apply health psychology to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in a system… mais…

This book, aimed at postgraduates and healthcare professionals and academics, is the first ever work to apply health psychology to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in a systematic and open-minded fashion. The authors, all health psychologists with considerable experience in the field, take an objective view of the nature of CAM, explaining the often semi-mystical background to some CAM approaches, and identifying where psychology can help to answer some crucial questions, such as why CAM sometimes appears to work, why sometimes it does not, and why some people are drawn to it and others not. In the nine chapters, the authors deal with contemporary meanings of health and illness and the differences and similarities between orthodox and complementary approaches to health, models of the person, health beliefs and experimental psychology, placebo, research methods in CAM, stress, coping and stress management, pain, chronic illness, communications and interactions between client and therapist, and the future for CAM and health psychology. CAM approaches are often dismissed out of hand by scientist-practitioners, but psychologists should, arguably, take a more sympathetic stance, since the psychological professions ought to be keen to understand why CAM is so popular, in its various cultural forms around the world, regardless of its actual efficacy as demonstrated by the research so far conducted. The authors argue that as a human phenomenon alone, CAM is undeniably important. Media >, [PU: Open University]<