ABSTRACT
The modern alternative health movement grew out of the countercultural, ecological and alternative food movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, feminist health activism from the same period, and a complex intermeshing with the New Age movement. Alternative therapies have, in certain kinds of ways, moved from marginal to mainstream, but the question of their relation to a biomedical dominant is neither simple nor politically neutral. Acupuncture provides a pointed example of the problems of categorization and labelling. When practised in the West, it is usually labelled as an ‘alternative’ therapy. One mechanism of domestication is the imposition of putatively neutral criteria for assessment and legitimization. Perhaps the most vital principle underlying alternative medicine is the idea of the body’s ability to heal itself. The spiritual character of much alternative medicine is one of its core features, and a particular point of difference from biomedicine. The spiritual basis of alternative health means that it views illness as deeply meaningful.
