Scientific evaluation of complementary and alternative medicines that contribute to integrative health: What science are we talking about?

We begin by noting the primary focus of the healthcare system on the technical and scientific aspects of care, with considerable effectiveness, but at the cost of a scientific approach dominated by positivism, sometimes to the detriment of its human dimension. We question the need to open up evaluation methods when integrating complementary and alternative medicines (CAMs). These methodological approaches, rooted in a framework other than positivism, would give greater scientific legitimacy to knowledge derived from lived experience, rigorously collected from both patients and CAM practitioners. In the first article, we examined the theoretical frameworks underpinning conventional medical practices in order to distinguish them from those on which CAMs are based. We illustrated this epistemological reflection using the example of subcutaneous resonance (RESC), a healthcare practice inspired by Chinese medicine. Here, we outline a framework for the scientific evaluation of RESC, applicable to CAMs in general, by placing this evaluation within the context of integrative health development. This evaluation will necessarily begin with an effort to clarify the paradigm within which a research question is to be framed, in order to broaden the choice, or even to bring different paradigms together, accepting their constraints, in order to ultimately exploit all their possibilities.