The article addresses contemporary epistemologies in examining struggles between the proponents of diverse medical approaches - some accepted as scientific and others that have not gained this status. It is based on research that investigated one of the central questions raised as a result of the growing popularity of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in western countries during the past three decades, namely: How can we know if CAM treatments are effective and beneficial? Discourse analysis was conducted on publications written by medical knowledge producers - experts participating in different professional groups addressing controversies over questions such as the desirability of researching CAM treatment effects, the appropriate methodology to be employed and the appropriate criteria for evaluating these effects. Some central debates are presented in the article. Examination of these controversies indicates that diverse kinds of knowledge are held by different groups of medical professionals. The ways in which they justify their knowledge and the rhetoric strategies they use for legitimizing it are specified. The great variety found among the different kinds of medical knowledge and rhetoric strategies and their dispersal along a ;scientific'-'nonscientific' continuum, highlight the untenable and ambiguous boundaries of orthodox institutionalized biomedical knowledge.

Because of the inherent complexity of human health, the provision of good quality patient care requires collaboration in multidisciplinary teams. Integrative healthcare provides a unique setting for the study of interprofessional collaboration in the context of power disparities. The research objective was to examine which means and mechanisms were used to facilitate interprofessional collaboration when integrating complementary medicine (CM) into a hospital's surgical department. Throughout 2010 we conducted a qualitative study in an Israeli public hospital's surgical department, using observations and 30 in-depth interviews with managers, surgeons, physicians, nurses, patients and CM practitioners. The sociological concepts of boundary actor and boundary object and the context of power relations served as a framework for this research. This article contributes to the field of interprofessional collaborative care research by: analysing types of collaboration inhibitors -epistemological and social-structural gaps; pointing to boundary actors who establish interprofessional collaboration in an integrative hospital setting and noting the boundary objects they use; and comparing collaboration levels. The collaboration between CM practitioners and the department's staff is a loosely coupled system. When coordination was achieved, reaching profound agreements seemed of lesser importance to the parties. Closer collaboration and cross-fertilisation were found among CM practitioners.

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