Law′s Dilemma: Validating Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the Clash of Evidential Paradigms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the (in)compatibility between the diagnostic and therapeutic theories of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and a science-based regulatory framework. Specifically, the paper investigates the nexus between statutory legitimacy and scientific validation of health systems, with an examination of its impact on the development of complementary and alternative therapies. The paper evaluates competing theories for validating CAM ranging from the RCT methodology to anthropological perspectives and contends that while the RCT method might be beneficial in the regulation of many CAM therapies, yet dogmatic adherence to this paradigm as the exclusive method for legitimizing CAM will be adverse to the independent development of many CAM therapies whose philosophies and mechanisms of action are not scientifically interpretable. Drawing on history and research evidence to support this argument, the paper sues for a regulatory model that is accommodative of different evidential paradigms in support of a pluralistic healthcare system that balances the imperative of quality assurance with the need to ensure access.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".