Paper short abstract:

This paper explores a medical community established on mistrust of the Western medical system. It examines how mistrust is articulated vis-à-vis both the suffering body and the medical institutions, and how it becomes a central aspect of the remarkable rise of alternative medical methods in Israel.

Paper long abstract:

Writing about the body, anthropologists have referred to pain within the Western biomedical model as the limit of one's agency (Asad, 2003), an inexplicable event (Kleinman, 1995), as though it were a 'lightning bolt' (Luhrmann, 2007). Thus, the suffering body has become a central site of uncertainty and mistrust in many cultures, where the biomedical model is prominent.

Following extensive fieldwork among complementary and alternative physicians and patients in Israel, I examine how mistrust was evoked and practiced within illness narratives, clinical encounters, professional training, and daily activities in the field. I demonstrate how this mistrust was generated in specific biographical intersections of pain and uncertainty. In these situations, the suffering subjects find themselves searching for ethical explanations for their pain and fail to find them within the mainstream medical systems.

I suggest that the interplay between the suffering body and mistrust serves as a key aspect both in undermining the biomedical's once indisputable legitimacy, and in the formation of new healing methods, medical communities, and epistemologies of trust and mistrust towards the body and the 'medical truth'. The result is an ethnographic interrogation of the ways in which mistrust shapes even the most individual experiences such as pain, and their contribution to community consolidations. It shows how practices and beliefs of mistrust soon become the basis for the disaffiliation from the mainstream medical systems and affiliation with "alternative" ones.