<p>This dissertation presents the results of ethnographic research conducted between September 2006 -August 2007 at Emeritus University; a large, multidisciplinary institution of natural medicine in the United States. Since its inception in 1978, Emeritus University has emphasized an integrated model of medicine and collaboration between practitioners of natural medicine and their allopathic counterparts. By focusing upon curriculum change and the process of learning among first year students in the Master of Science in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine (AOM) program, I explore the ways in which increasing emphasis upon integration with biomedical models of education, practice, and research influences the AOM curriculum, the professional values inculcated within first year AOM students, and their sense of professional identity and position within the US medical landscape. In addition, this research elucidates how the interests, goals, and decisions of first year students shape and influence the curriculum and the identity of AOM. My research was informed by critical medical anthropology, which situates schools of medical education, and the experiences of individual students, within the historical and political structures of medical pluralism, state regulation, professionalization, biomedical dominance, and the capitalistic world system.</p> <p>This research contributes to our knowledge of the evolution of a complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) modality within the US, the roles played by a school of CAM in the transformation of AOM's identity; the socialization of students and the process of learning; the role of agency; and the implications of integration for the identity of AOM, its practitioners, and health care in the United States. Emeritus University's emphasis upon integration has resulted in an increasingly standardized and biomedically based curriculum. While participants perceived such changes to be part of the 'Americanization' of AOM, from the perspective of critical medical anthropology, integration has serious implications for the identity of AOM and its practitioners. Far from advancing the critique of Biomedicine and the medical system embodied by the holistic and alternative health movements of the 1960's and 70's, Emeritus University may serve to replicate the hegemony of Biomedicine, underscore the primacy of its practitioners, and pave the way towards co-optation of acupuncture and Oriental medicine in the United States.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/17299 |
| Date | 06 1900 |
| Creators | Flesch, Hannah |
| Contributors | Badone, Ellen E.F., Anthropology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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