Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America: Issues of Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Abstract

A fascinating history could be written about the pursuit of “alternative,” so-called holistic healing in America over the last third of the twentieth century. Interpretatively, it might echo those historians of the British working class who have perceived the take-up of “physical puritanism” among radicals after the defeat of Chartism as an individualistic means to retaining political face. Possibly, for the WASPish survivors of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, patronage of alternative medicine has provided something similar—the disposal of surplus income on non-establishment healers, granting the survivors a sense of continued faith with social and political values and aspirations marginalized in the 1980s and 1990s. The medical sociologist Hans A. Baer offers some evidence to support such a view, but the real strength of his study lies in revealing its limits. Different types of alternative medicine, he shows, have come to appeal to different, if often fragmented, groupings for a wide variety of social, occupational, religious, ethnic, and gendered reasons. Moreover, the respective constituencies for practices such as chiropractic, naturopathy, acupuncture, and faith healing have changed over time in relation to the degree to which their spokespersons and institutions have sought either to distance or accommodate themselves to biomedicine. Above all, Baer is concerned with assessing the alternativeness of these healing “systems” in relation to biomedicine, rather than with how historical sense might be made of them individually or collectively. Cast within a familiar 1970s critique of orthodox medicine's professional monopoly (perceived as a product of person-reductive, state-supported corporate capitalism), Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America posits essentially a hierarchy of impurity and tensions: from the most to the least biomedically polluted healing practices. Within this schema, professionalization and its rhetoric is seen as a co-opting (even “ideological”) force in itself—“a subtle but highly effective hegemonic process by which alternative practitioners internalize some … of the philosophical premises, therapeutic approaches, and organizational structures of biomedicine.” Thus osteopathy, organized as a medical system parallel to biomedicine and supported by social elites, stands at the head of this morally inverted hierarchy. Nearer the bottom are domesticated versions of African, Haitian, and other types of folk healing, many of them barely institutionalized or professionalized and often providing cultural identity and pride to poor non-WASP communities (although, as Baer insists, few of those practices are entirely free from biomedical capitalist influence, acquired wittingly or unwittingly). Predictably, Baer concludes with a plea for “an authentically holistic and pluralistic medical system” that would offer health to all, transcend the evils of capitalism, and align with democratic eco-socialism.