Standards of education, regulation, and market control: perspectives on complementary and alternative medicine in Ontario, Canada.

This paper provides a contemporary analysis of the issues and questions surrounding the regulation and standardization of education with respect to two complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) professions, namely Chinese traditional medicine and homeopath in Ontario, Canada. Rather than taking a standard of education for granted, the assumption that standardizing professional education is a positive move is critiqued because it is claimed to ensure public safety and uniformity within the profession. It is argued that such an assumption fails to deconstruct the power relations involved with setting a standard of education and continues to ignore the fact that setting a standard of education in CAM is part and parcel of biomedical dominance, competition, turf wars and survival. At the end of this paper, some critical questions regarding setting standards of education by the health professions in general are raised.