Contemporary North American society is undergoing a transformation from the orderly modern era to a fragmented postmodern era. A model of the key features that define postmodern society is developed that serves to identify how the postmodern process shapes culture and affects contemporary health care practises and beliefs. The academic, popular, medical and postmodern literature were reviewed, summarized, and examined as data to develop this model. Alternative medicine is commonly believed to provide more time to patients, be less intrusive, more holistic, less technologically based, and more natural than biomedicine. Eleven physicians, eleven alternative healers and fourteen patients were interviewed, and objective data was collected to assess these qualitative distinctions. Only nature, and to some degree holism, distinguished alternative medicine from biomedicine. Patients used alternative medicine in conjunction with biomedicine rather than instead of biomedicine. Contemporary patient beliefs and practises can be understood as a recapitulation of postmodern culture.
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