ABSTRACT
Drawing on interviews undertaken for an ethnographic study of professionalisation and alternative medicine in the UK, this chapter explores accounts from alternative practitioners about the kind of health work that they do. What struck me during the research was that, in describing the work they do, key concepts used in the promotion of health discourse were mirrored, and it is this I want to explore. By doing so I hope to draw some conclusions on the implications of a congruency, or ‘fit’, between them for both policy and practice of alternative medicine and health promotion. For alternative medicine, there are key implications arising from the debate about the integration of therapies into mainstream health services, which are currently dominated, at public level, by medicine. This debate focuses on developing the evidence for alternative medicine and extracting techniques, using what ‘works’, to deal with symptoms and pathology. However, if the work of alternative medicine mirrors a salutogenic, health-promoting perspective of health, as I suggest, harnessing this may provide an opportunity to reorientate and move forward a public health agenda that is able to provide a communitybased network of health delivery that is inclusive, equitable and driven from the grassroots.
