Paper short abstract:

How has a fearful 'state of emergency', being also a marketing strategy that promotes dominant medicine, come to permeate our relationship to health as consumers and to destabilise traditional holism? Participant narratives offer an anti-capitalist stance, refuting passive acceptance of biomedicine.

Paper long abstract:

Just as other topics in this conference explore descriptive anthropological domains, such as ways in which individuals, member-groups, communities and societies in a changing but obligatory contemporary world, encounter, experience and "traverse Landscapes of Infrastructure" [Panel 10], this paper discusses how a fearful 'state of emergency' concept, or 'siege mentality', has come to permeate prevailing emotions and consumer relationships to health, when seeking healthcare within a capitalist schema. We are terrified by prospective threats to our assumed health, posed by infectious disease, cancer, genetic mutation, terminal heart or kidney failure, and newly emerged viruses. This concept is well symbolised by a panic-inducing image --similar to the zombie icon-- of a mutant, irremediably-contaminated 'chimera', effectively disguised in medical scrubs, now escaped from the ER** and roaming through society preying on random victims. Name it 'disease', and watch it overcome us with fear, as we run for a doctor! Such symbolism highlights biomedicine's reliance on fear as an effective marketing strategy, one that both promotes and fortifies dominant medicine, corralling the vast majority of citizens into a passive or helpless state of accepting biomedical norms unquestioningly, while coincidentally destabilising traditional spiritually-based knowledge of holistic wellbeing and healing. Participant narratives highlight their defiance of this passive fear-borne state when choosing to heal themselves and families using 'alternatives'. Complementary, alternative and traditional forms of medicine (CAM) are thus seen to reflect a political outlook, that refutes a two-dimensional Cartesian biomedical paradigm, and refuses to 'buy into' the capitalist model of health consumption. **Emergency Room.