<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Employing in-depth interviews with general and alternative practitioners from two towns in Transylvania, and participant observations in spaces where they practice their knowledge, I describe how certain discursive acts reformulate the body and the subject-patient. Alternative therapists construct their practice in direct opposition to several parameters of biomedicine, such as the logic of diagnosis, treatment, and the praxis of patient’s visit to the general practitioner’s office, discussed in the paper. They define their approach as psychosomatic, and set-up the medical space as a confessional space, envisioning a holistic corporeality and the idea of the “inner doctor” in each patient. This conduct would supposedly make the subject “active” and “empowered”, as opposed to the “passive” patient succumbed to the diagnosis of conventional doctors.</p></abstract>

This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Employing in-depth interviews with general and alternative practitioners from two towns in Transylvania, and participant observations in spaces where they practice their knowledge, I describe how certain discursive acts reformulate the body and the subject-patient. Alternative therapists construct their practice in direct opposition to several parameters of biomedicine, such as the logic of diagnosis, treatment, and the praxis of patient’s visit to the general practitioner’s office, discussed in the paper. They define their approach as psychosomatic, and set-up the medical space as a confessional space, envisioning a holistic corporeality and the idea of the “inner doctor” in each patient. This conduct would supposedly make the subject “active” and “empowered”, as opposed to the “passive” patient succumbed to the diagnosis of conventional doctors.

Alternative Medicine as Counter-Conduct: Therapeutic Spaces and Medical Rationality in Contemporary Romania

MA in Applied Anthropology at the Babeș-Bolyai University and MA in Psychosomatic Medicine at the “Iuliu Hațieganu” University of Medicine, Cluj-Napoca

Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai Sociologia

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

This study analyses the practice of medical pluralism in contemporary Romania, addressing the phenomenon of alternative medicine through the Foucauldian...

Alternative Medicine as Counter-Conduct: Therapeutic Spaces and Medical Rationality in Contemporary Romania

Published Online: Jan 29, 2016

Page range: 5 - 20

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0007

Keywords
counter-conduct, biomedicine, alternative medicines, patient subject

© 2015 Corina Rusu, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Alternative Medicine as Counter-Conduct: Therapeutic Spaces and Medical Rationality in Contemporary Romania

Published Online: Jan 29, 2016

Page range: 5 - 20

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/subbs-2015-0007

Keywordscounter-conduct, biomedicine, alternative medicines, patient subject

© 2015 Corina Rusu, published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
counter-conduct, biomedicine, alternative medicines, patient subject