Full circle of alternative medicine?

Historians from Warwick and Leicester Universities in the UK have been awarded £600 000 by the Wellcome Trust to look at the changing relationship between conventional and alternative medicine throughout the centuries. They say that opinions have almost come full-circle; while it was accepted that people could choose to go to conventionally trained doctors or the village wise woman for advice in the sixteenth century, traditional medicine had become sidelined in the following centuries until very recently. The historians describe the growing acceptance of traditional remedies as a return to the values of 500 years ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3059293.stm (16 July 2003)