Devices of difference: On the socio-material forms and effects of technologies in complementary and alternative medicine.

0502495 - SOÚ 2020 RIV GB eng J - Journal Article
Klepal, Jaroslav - Stöckelová, Tereza
Devices of difference: On the socio-material forms and effects of technologies in complementary and alternative medicine.
Science as Culture. Roč. 28, č. 4 (2019), s. 513-537. ISSN 0950-5431. E-ISSN 1470-1189
R&D Projects: GA ČR GA15-16452S
Institutional support: RVO:68378025
Keywords : Czech Republic * complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) * medical technology
OECD category: Sociology
Impact factor: 1.705, year: 2019
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09505431.2019.1572734

Despite the widespread view that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a ‘natural’ and low-tech form of healthcare, by contrast with biomedicine, there are numerous devices used in the field of CAM that employ electricity as a diagnostic and therapeutic agent. These devices bring together different types and sources of knowledge, Western and Eastern theories, and expert and lay hands. They foreground complex psychosomatic, social, and environmental relations in which the patient’s body and well-being are constituted. They are used to address biomedicine’s iatrogenic effects and its indifference to specific bodily processes and entities (such as meridians or parasites). In effect they challenge, extend, and reinterpret biomedicine, thereby becoming one of the mediators between it and CAM. Although these devices are sought out by patients and used effectively by CAM practitioners, their ontological choreography and radius can become precarious in a healthcare system dominated by biomedicine. Different CAM devices then deal with the realities of biomedicine in different ways. While some modes of practising CAM devices are inclusive of biomedicine and carefully experiment with the realities it has inscribed in patients’ bodies, others reject biomedicine altogether.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0295564