ABSTRACT
This chapter expands on the view that the home is an active therapeutic centre by looking at where ideas and suggestions about health and well-being practices come from. People develop hierarchies of trust in health professionals when considering how to respond to health concerns, and in addition they draw on wide networks of informal sources, including family, friends and work colleagues. People undertake their own research activities, using the Internet, libraries and reference books to inform their medication practices. This whirl of hybridising activity has a muted presence when people become patients, consulting the health professional. In the space of the health care consultation, householders, as patients, quickly learn what forms of understanding are legitimate and what should not be brought inside the clinic for deliberation. Clinical spaces can attempt to maintain pure categories of science and pseudo-science, conventional and alternative, which are mixed up in unanticipated ways in the home.
