Ethics in complementary and alternative medicine

Nowadays, complementary and alternative medicine is considered as an important part of healthcare management. General population highly accepted it which signifies ethical issues as a challenge to all healthcare specialists. Concerning the risk-benefit issues such as the severity and acuteness of illness; the curability of the disease by conventional treatment modalities; the degree of invasiveness, the linken toxicities, and the side effects of the conventional treatment; the accessibility and quality of evidence of usefulness and safety of the desired CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) treatment; the level of information about the risks and benefits of the CAM treatment combined with the patient’s knowledge and voluntary acceptance of those risks; and the patient’s persistence of intention to use CAM therapies; providers can delineate a plan that is clinically sound, ethically suitable, and aimed at the particular experience of individual patients. Physicians are proposed to remain committed in problem-solving with their patients and to try to reveal the patient’s core values and opinions while guiding about CAM modalities.In this article some of more obvious or practical ethical aspects of complementary and alternative medicine have been discussed.