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Paper short abstract

In post-dictatorial Chile, a form of Integrative Medicine emerged. Practitioners with a history of anti-Pinochet political engagement developed a community-based IM, emphasizing relational subjectivities. This shift became a political act that contests biomedical power and reconfigures healthcare.

Paper long abstract

My PhD research, conducted in the 2010s, explored Medical Pluralism in Chile. Specifically, I focused on a mode of integrative medicine (IM) practiced in two centers in northern Santiago, which was reframed by healthcare professionals as community-based and solidarian primary healthcare.

A key finding concerned the practitioners’ background: most were initially involved in the social and community medicine movements of the mid-twentieth century, and later, in the resistance against Pinochet's dictatorship (1973-1999). Their shift raised the question: why did these highly politically engaged physicians and nurses choose a form of healthcare detached from both the political project of rebuilding democracy and the official guidelines of the Ministry of Health?

My research revealed that the practitioners' trajectories during and immediately after the dictatorship led them to a deep critical assessment of their medical and political participation. This process resulted in new ways of understanding and practicing healthcare: a mode drawing on various approaches and medical systems, emphasizing the relational dimension of subjectivities rather than focusing on specific diseases or syndromes.

I used Jacques Rancière's perspective on political disagreements to understand how this mode of addressing and producing bodies and places of enunciation, served to reconfigure the field of health and healthcare, and ultimately implies a highly political act.

I will present a life story from my research to discuss how this particular form of Integrative Medicine organized medical pluralism and became a way to contest the biomedical power dominating the epistemic and practical realms of healthcare.