IntroductionIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in complementary medicine, and even alternative medicine (Lee-Treweek 2002, Andrews 2004, Barry 2006). Additionally, the number of professionally trained therapists and practitioners has increased, providing the patient/client with better choice and at more competitive rates (Smallwood, 2005). In this essay, a critical assessment of the view that "patients' use of complementary and alternative medicine can be understood as part of the individualization of responsibility for health", will be advanced and argued, that many aspects influence the use of such therapies. Responsibility for health has changed and this will be discussed through examples of sociological theories. Medical sociologists have previously been concerned with illness rather than health. Functionalists such as Parsons (1951) suggested that illness was a deviance and had the effect of disrupting society and needed to be controlled. He used the sickness certificate to illustrate that the sick person was excused from functioning normally, but that this should be kept to a minimum and the sick person should want to get better. The function of the medical profession was to socially control the use of sick notes for truly ill people (Webb, Westergaard, 2004). However, in today's society, the working person aims to continue working during certain illnesses or at least limit the time spent away from work. Doing this means taking some responsibility for staying healthy and reducing the time spent actually sick. Therefore, by choosing to use alternative and alternative medicines, it could provide an additional method that could combat the illness and help speed up recovery (Lett, 2000).08015960Possible reasons why the patient/clie..... . middle of paper .... ..t approach of dictating the direction the National Health Service should follow. This led to a considerable change in the way services were delivered, with costs influencing many decisions. Clinical governance emerged in the late 1990s, when New Labor took power, and evidence-based practice became the norm. Netteleton (2010) compares clinical governance to the term “governmentality” used by Foucault, according to which collective objectives are controlled. Evidence-based practice has been one of the most challenging aspects of combining alternative medicine and alternative practices because it is difficult to obtain quality evidence and measure it. Integration into mainstream health care will depend on finding a balance between the two disciplines. However, if individualism proves to favor CAM and alternative methods, then social pressure may yield more quickly than academic struggle..