Alternative Medicine? A History
By Roberta Bivins
Oxford University Press £14.99, 238 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

On the rare occasions that he tires of attacking religion, Richard Dawkins enjoys nothing more than taking a few pot-shots at alternative medicine. In August he presented a Channel 4 documentary lambasting the “Irrational Health Service” as a “multimillion-pound industry that impoverishes our culture and throws us new age gurus who exhort us to run away from reality”. Two months before that the pharmacologist David Colquhoun called for universities to stop awarding degrees in alternative medicine, saying, “Gobbledygook is being taught in some UK universities as though it were science.”

What these criticisms have in common is an assumption that the Enlightenment ushered in a golden age of orthodox medicine, based on rigorous and objective scientific investigation of the world, which is now being undermined by, in Dawkins’ words, “an epidemic of superstitious thinking”.

But the boundaries between orthodox and alternative medicine have never been stable, as Roberta Bivins reminds us in this elegant and engaging book. Alternative medicine is nothing new, and the ways in which the traditions of China, India and elsewhere have influenced medicine in Europe can be traced back over centuries. As recently as the 18th century there were many similarities between these different medical systems in the way that they thought about the human body and its relationship to the universe. This common heritage has been written out of the history of western medicine.

Over time, notions of orthodoxy have become more rigid. Because conventional biomedicine now presents itself as possessing absolute knowledge, practitioners of different approaches are forced to position themselves as “complementary” or “alternative”.

Bivins takes us on a fascinating journey from east to west and back again, tracing the flows of knowledge and tradition that have shaped medicine as it is practised today. She gives the example of Tiger Balm, now sold in brightly coloured hexagonal jars in over 100 countries. Although Tiger Balm is manufactured in Singapore, its largest market is the United States, and the internet now makes it easier than ever for customers in the west to access unorthodox remedies from anywhere in the world.

Just as western medicine is influenced by other cultures, so the medical systems of China and India are themselves evolving. Bivins emphasises that “at no point – and certainly not over the course of the 20th century – have indigenous medical systems remained static in the face of biomedicine.” This suggests that a new chapter for alternative medicine may be about to unfold in which the growing economies combine their growing capabilities for frontier science with traditional forms of knowledge to create new hybrids – for example, between modern pharmaceuticals and traditional Chinese medicine. Professor Dawkins may not like it, but it looks as if alternative medicine is here to stay.

James Wilsdon is head of science and innovation at the think-tank Demos