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 bio-medical model as the limit of one's agency (Asad, 2003), and as evidence of the body's betrayal (Kleinman, 1988). Thus, it seems that the suffering body has become a central site of mistrust in many cultures, where the bio-medical model is prominent.

Following extensive fieldwork among complementary and alternative physicians and patients in Israel, I examine how mistrust was evoked, practiced and articulated within illness narratives, clinical encounters, professional training, debates regarding professional jurisdiction, and daily activities in the field. 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'.

This ethnographic perspective provides a rather intimate look at the ways in which mistrust shapes even the most individual experiences, such as pain. It shows how "personal" practices and beliefs of mistrust soon become the basis for the disaffiliation from the mainstream medical systems and affiliation with an "alternative" one: a mistrusting medical community.

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford University Press.

Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness narratives: Suffering, healing, and the human condition. Basic books.