Dr. Cassidy is an associate editor of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and has over 65 professional publications to her credit including books, chapters, and articles. She is the author of the textbook, Contemporary Acupuncture and Chinese Medicine (Elsevier, 2002). She co-chaired (with Wayne Jonas, MD) the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Alternative Medicine Panel on Epistemology and Methodology in 1992-1993 and later served on the Planning Committee for the landmark 1997 NIH Consensus Panel on Acupuncture. She was Research Director at the Traditional Acupuncture Institute (now TAI-Sophia), near Baltimore, and while there she performed the first U.S. national survey of acupuncture users. In 1998 she entered Chinese medicine school in Bethesda, MD, graduated in 2001, and has since worked as a clinician.

Cassidy earned her interdisciplinary doctorate in Human Biology at the University of Wisconsin, and completed post-doctoral programs at the Smithsonian Institution (Anthropology) and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (History of Medicine). She served on anthropology faculties of the Universities of Minnesota and Maryland, pioneering courses in cross-cultural and comparative human medicine; and carried out medical and nutritional anthropology research in Mauritania, Sri Lanka, Belize and the United States, focusing on mother and child nutrition.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Cassidy discusses the nonjudgmental health worldview of anthropology, in which the world’s healing arts are seen as a series of alternatives rather than a hierarchy. She looks at biomedicine, the politically dominant healing art in the West (and increasingly elsewhere), finding strengths, weaknesses, and paths for further evolution. She describes challenges faced by practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine, while foreseeing a changed landscape in which all healing arts are seen as alternatives rather than a hierarchy in which biomedicine always occupies the top rung.

You started out as a medical anthropologist. What is medical anthropology?

It is a specialty within anthropology in which the practitioners are interested in how people practice medicine anywhere in the world. They might be somewhere in a tribal situation, talking to people in a village setting, learning how they take care of themselves when they’re ill, how they define illness, how they experience illness, what it means within the society, and what kind of training the practitioners get. Or, they could be doing exactly the same thing in an urban setting, with any kind of medicine, from what people like to call ‘regular’ medicine, which is more accurately called biomedicine or allopathy, to anything else, such as chiropractic or naturopathy or Christian Science healing or acupuncture.

So this anthropological point of view allows us to understand and respect cultures different from our own.

Yes, and to realize that this is a healing intentionality, as opposed to a harming one. There are many things like that which can be taken from medical anthropology. For example, in the Appalachian area, there are ‘burn doctors,’ although they’re not that common any more. If you start talking to people and they feel safe around you, they will talk about the folk practitioners. Burn doctors are people who specifically are able to take away burns, especially the pain of burns. They do it with prayers. Another kind of health care practitioner, particularly a biomedical practitioner working in that area, might need to understand, and even work in parallel with, the burn doctor. So that on one side they’re getting physical care for the burn and on the other side, they’re getting what is essentially spiritual care for the burn.