Pursuing health and negotiating 'cure': a reflexive sociology of alternative medical practices
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2006
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Abstract
Informed by the sociological theory of Foucault, Bourdieu, and Appadurai, this study investigates, ' What accounts for the increasing popularity of alternative medical practices in societies of the West, such as Canada?'. The focus is to explore the social spaces within which users of complementary / alternative medical practices negotiate cure, the forms of Bourdieuvian capital available to users, and how these are associated with the use of complementary / alternative medicine. The approach of Bourdieu's "reflexive sociology" is applied to explain the interconnections amongst the sweeping cultural transformations taking place within Western society, subjectivity, social practice, and the resurgence of medical pluralism. I suggest an operationalization of complementary / alternative medical practices that provides a basis for sociological study of medical pluralism focused on understanding how, amid a transnational, cultural context, sociocultural factors influence the pursuit of health. This study proceeds through three steps in a "sequential mixed method design": First, primary data from 12 interviews and a survey of 875 family physicians practicing in Alberta, Canada is used to develop a sociological classification of complementary / alternative medicine based upon physicians' assessments of efficacy, identifying those complementary / alternative medicine practices whose legitimacy is accepted by physicians; distinguishing them from rejected complementary / alternative medicine practices. Step 2 uses cross sectional data from the Canadian Community Health Survey to map the locations, in what Bourdieu calls "social space", of users of the two variants of complementary / alternative medicine, identified instep 1. The analysis provides both descriptive information in which the patterns of usage of accepted and rejected complementary / alternative medical practices are contrasted and multinomial logit models are used to estimate the factors which influence the use of the two variants of complementary / alternative medical practice. Step 3 uses in-depth interviews conducted with family physicians and 41 users of complementary / alternative medicine to build upon the findings from the quantitative analyses of the first part of the dissertation to further explain the relationship between the capital resources held by users and their negotiation of cure. A phenomenological typology of users of complementary /alternative medical practices is presented.
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Bibliography: p. 351-390
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Fries, C. J. (2006). Pursuing health and negotiating 'cure': a reflexive sociology of alternative medical practices (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/488