Animal Pharm Reports
Market Opportunities in Natural and Alternative Animal Health Products
Published October 2004
Subscribe to Animal Pharm to receive the full report
CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION1.1 Definitions – what is complementary and alternative medicine?
There are many terms used to describe non-conventional medicine: ‘natural’, ‘holistic’, ‘alternative’, ‘complementary’. The most common term is a combination of two of these: ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ (CAM) which, at least in the context of human health in the US, has become a quasi-technical term. ‘Complementary’ and ‘alternative’ are often used synonymously. However, they are not synonyms:
• ‘Alternative’ means a form of treatment that is different from – or instead of – conventional therapy.
The two terms are thus mutually exclusive if applied correctly, but they are not (yet) precise technical terms – they are often used interchangeably. The abbreviations CAM for complementary and alternative medicine, and CAVM for the veterinary counterpart, have become widely used in English speaking countries to cover all aspects of the sector. These are the terms used in this report, and, by definition, CAVM is taken to include all the sectors analysed in this report.
More specific definitions of CAM define the sector only in terms of what it is not. In 2002, the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Section staff of the National Library of Medicine defined CAM as:
‘Therapeutic practices, which are not currently considered an integral part of conventional allopathic medical practice.’
The US National Institute of Health Panel on Definition and Description, 1997 defined CAM as:
‘A broad domain of healing resources that encompass all health systems, modalities, and practices and their accompanying theories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the politically dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period. CAM includes all such practices and ideas self-defined by their users as preventing or treating illness or promoting health and well-being. Boundaries within CAM and between the CAM domain and the domain of the dominant system are not always sharp or fixed.’
CAM is thus defined in terms of what it is not, ie it is not conventional medicine. The Institute of Complimentary Medicine, a UK-based charity, notes a defining characteristic by stating that what all CAM have in common ‘is that they treat the patient as a whole person rather than treating a specific symptom or symptoms. It [CAM] does this by treating the life force of the patient at their physical, mental and emotional levels’ (www.icmedicine.co.uk/whatiscm).
Whilst readers with a conventional scientific education may be uneasy with the use of the imprecise term ‘life force’, the Institute’s definition makes it clear that the approach of CAM is clearly different from that of conventional allopathic medicine. In the latter, the practitioner diagnoses a causal disease, and then treats the disease in isolation. In CAM, the practitioner treats the person, noting physical, emotional/psychological, dietary and other lifestyle issues. The intention of allopathic medicine is to cure the patient of the disease, ie to remove it through the application of pharmaceutically active drugs. In CAM, the intention is to heal the patient by bringing the body back into balance. The disease will thus be cured more by the natural healing abilities of the body. The cause of this imbalance may be psychological or environmental, with the disease being a consequence of this imbalance, rather than a cause of it. This is clearly a very different approach to that of allopathic medicine, where the disease is the problem to be addressed, not to say attacked.
Certainly, this distinction between CAM and allopathic medicine is more useful than whether the medicines are based on ‘natural’ products, which is one claim that CAM often makes. Boundaries here are often very blurred: many pharmaceutical drugs have their roots in substances of plant origin, and many so-called herbal medicines prepared to pharmaceutical standards use pharmaceutical adjuvants. Moreover, there is of course, nothing necessarily healthy about natural products, which include nicotine, arsenic and cocaine.
With respect to human health, CAM is probably more appropriate for chronic rather than acute conditions. As such, it complements conventional medicine which is less effective with chronic diseases such as low level viruses, arthritis, back ache, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME – also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, CFS), etc. It is possible that many chronic conditions have significant psychological causes and as such, CAM is more effective in curing these. This is because a series of hour-long consultations with a CAM practitioner with good listening skills who is able to make recommendations about diet, lifestyle, thought patterns etc, may be more effective than a 10-minute consultation with a doctor whose only two options are prescribing drugs and advising the patient to ‘get lots of rest’.
CAM, according to the above definition, includes all non-conventional treatments. These include those that have been established for hundreds, if not thousands of years, but are based on a non-Western view of the way the body works (eg Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurvedic medicine), through more recent western approaches such as homeopathy, to the wilder shores of crystal healing, iridology and chakra balancing. Whilst this report is happy to dismiss the last three as being mumbo jumbo (or at the very least of being ineffective in treating sick animals), CAM clearly includes a wide range of approaches of varying credibility. In the context of this report on CAM for animals, the principal sectors are:
• homeopathy – the use of very dilute solutions of active ingredients to cure the patient on the basis of like-cures-like. This is western in origin.
• herbal medicines (phytomedicines) – the use of plant extracts. This includes the Chinese and Indian (Ayurvedic) systems, as well as less well-developed approaches from North America, Europe and elsewhere.
• nutritional supplements (nutraceuticals). This approach is more recognisably scientific in its approach, in that the intake of nutrients with known therapeutic effects is increased.
The various forms of complementary medicine, both techniques and substances, all have their own, underlying philosophy. However, they all have in common that they are in some way natural. Quite often, the do not have to undergo the same degree of regulation and licensing as conventional medicine and pharmaceuticals. The efforts that are made in the different parts of the world to change this situation and also to harmonise regulations between countries are described in the markets section of this report.
1.2 Reasons for the increased interest in complementary and alternative medicine
In many countries, there has been a significant increase in the interest in, and use of, complementary and alternative health methods and products for animals over recent decades. There are several interconnected reasons for this:
• There is increasing concern over the use of high levels of veterinary pharmaceuticals, particular in commercial livestock, but also in companion animals. One of the key issues is pharmaceutical residues in meat products, in particular antibiotics, which may lead to increased resistance in either animals or humans. This has lead to stricter regulation of the use of pharmaceuticals.
• Individuals (and, arguably, the scientific/medical establishment) have become increasingly aware of the limits of conventional allopathic medicine that attempts to cure the disease rather than heal the patient. This is particularly true of chronic rather than acute conditions (low-level viruses, digestive problems, eczema, etc).
• Conventional medicine, at least historically, has had little to say about the influence of nutrition, lifestyle, psychological processes, etc on the maintenance of a patient’s health or their recovery from disease. Although this is now changing (especially as regards the importance of nutrition and exercise), conventional medicine attempts to cure the diagnosed disease, rather than heal the patient. Although this may sound like semantics, there is a significant difference between these approaches. The latter is ‘holistic’, in that it treats the patient rather than the disease and will consider psychological, lifestyle, nutrition and other factors.
• As consumers have used more alternative medicine to manage their own health, so they have used the same approach for that of their pets.
• The rise in organic farming (in itself due to in part to concern about pesticide and pharmaceutical residues, and environmental degradation) has presented a new market to manufacturers of alternative animal health products.
• The recent interest in alternative medicine has been part of a wider interest in all things alternative (often grouped under the imprecise term of ‘new age’) in western Europe and North America over the last decade. The reasons for this are many and varied, and probably include scepticism about the western technology-based approach to problem solving, increased travel and awareness of other cultures, and a realisation that economic growth and higher disposable income does not in itself lead to fulfilment.
Email a friend
Digital RSS Feed
