ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on qualitative interviews with a small number of Australian spiritual healers and medical clairvoyants in order to reflect on the particular conundrums posed by forms of healing that are marginal to mainstream biomedicine and paradigmatically starkly different from it, and yet which co-exist with it in subterranean form in many modern Western societies. It focuses on practices in which healers claim to offer insights, interpretation and guidance, be that diagnostic information, treatment suggestions or metaphysical interpretations of illness, and asks: is it desirable, and indeed even possible, that such practices be formally regulated?
