Disciplinary incorporation: Conditions enabling CAM’s expansion and institutionalization in Europe and North America

Drawing on a critical interpretive synthesis of interdisciplinary scholarship, this article examines how complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) expanded and was institutionalized in Europe and North America from the 1970s onward amid broader transformations in medicine, society, and global governance. Contributing to Health’s 30th anniversary special issue, this article identifies six intersecting conditions that collectively enabled CAM’s growing visibility, recognition, and institutional incorporation: (1) intellectual, feminist, and epistemological critiques that destabilized biomedical authority and re-centered lived experience; (2) a broad social turn in public health that reframed disease causation through structural and behavioral determinants; (3) the rethinking of modernization and the emergence of medical pluralism, which challenged universalist accounts of modern medicine; (4) neoliberal restructuring and consumerism, which marketized care and expanded spaces for alternative therapeutics; (5) the scientification and professionalization of CAM through research, clinical trials, and training infrastructures; and (6) the growing influence of the World Health Organization, which promoted CAM’s incorporation into health systems while standardizing practices and conditioning recognition on alignment with biomedical norms. Together, these shifts produced a heterogeneous field shaped by disciplinary incorporation: CAM practices were selectively legitimated insofar as they were rendered legible to biomedical, scientific, and regulatory frameworks, redrawing rather than simply widening the boundaries of medical legitimacy.