What Is Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine: An Operational Typology (Part 2, The Typology)

The field of Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine (TCIM) is complex, comprising a diverse range of ethnomedical and non-ethnomedical therapeutic systems and practices whose primary shared characteristic is that they fall outside of the boundaries of Biomedicine's standard of care in a particular context. To date, however, there has been no rigorously elaborated classification system to support scholars, educators, policymakers, and clinicians to meaningfully delineate the field's features. This work, an operational typology of TCIM, fills that gap.

Operational typologies are one form of operational definition in which a series of "ideal types" group phenomena with shared attributes into theoretically defined categories. As detailed in the first article of this three-part series (of which the current work is the second), the typology presented in the current article is built on a conceptual analysis of TCIM-related definitional indications provided by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO has for decades recognized the vital role of TCIM knowledges and practices in primary health care worldwide and continues to call for TCIM's greater integration within national health systems. In addition, conceptual insights from sociological and anthropological scholarship support the typology's design.

The typology has six primary "types": (A) Orally Transmitted Ethnomedical Systems and Practices, (B) Codified Ethnomedical Systems and Practices, (C) Non-Ethnomedical Whole Systems, (D) Complementary Therapeutics, (E) Community-Based Therapeutics, and (F) Integrative Therapeutics. These types, which are understood as dynamic and permeable (rather than static and fixed), each have their own subtypes, meant to support more nuanced classifications.

Readers interested in a more detailed account of the typology's applications will refer to the third and fourth articles in this series.