:I'm not really interested in hyperbolic assertions (who said anything about 'western canons of legitimacy being irrelevant').  but if you want a good solid sourced quote to use, let's use the one Gandy provided at the beginning of the #Continued from above... section: "Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) is a broad domain of resources that encompasses health systems, modalities, and practices and their accompanying theories and beliefs, other than those intrinsic to the dominant health system of a particular society or culture in a given historical period. CAM includes such resources perceived by their users as associated with positive health outcomes. Boundaries within CAM and between the CAM domain and the domain of the dominant system are not always sharp or fixed." (gandy, we seem to have lost the citation for this - can you recover it?).  As I said then, it's hellishly wordy (mine is much simpler, and says the essentially the same), but at least it's a straight-forward description.

we'll deal with synth as it arises.  Ludwigs2