ABSTRACT
The diversity of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) modalities, the variation in practitioner skills, and the free market context all mean that a productive negotiation of these therapies as medical phenomena requires skill, social and economic capital and also, importantly, luck. For others, though, CAM would have to be seen as congruent with a host of biomedical and lifestyle ‘enhancement technologies’, which construe pleasure as part of one’s ‘right’ to self-fulfilment. In caring, respectful CAM settings, which she calls a ‘meeting place’, home, she claims, can be (re)created; past connected with present; ‘female’ knowledge respected; deep care practised; and the unspeakable voiced through the body. Cultural Studies, meanwhile, can bring important conceptual subtlety and a political sensibility to bear on those streams in CAM where critical thought and conception remain underdeveloped. The intellectual and practical project of integrative medicine requires specialization – not only in medicine and CAM science but also in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
