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Paper short abstract:

We focus on alternative medical devices using electricity as their diagnostic or therapeutic agent that thrive on the margins of the Czech healthcare system. Following Mol, we discuss how these devices enact entities such as living bodies, pathogens, and diseases with(out) respect to biomedicine.

Paper long abstract:

Technologies, translated, and embodied into various medical devices, have become highly visible features of biomedicine as it is practiced today. Medical devices have reshaped diagnostic and therapeutic practices, enacted human bodies in particular ways and helped new forms of biosociality to emerge (Casper and Morrison 2010). Yet, there have also been medical devices that supplement, challenge, or even subvert biomedicine. Based on our ethnographic fieldwork at the interfaces between biomedical and alternative therapeutic practices in the Czech Republic, we discuss 'alternative medical devices' that use electricity as their diagnostic and/or therapeutic agent, such as Akudiast, Stimul, Salvia, Akustim, Bicom, and Super Ravo Zapper. Some of these devices were designed, patented, and circulated only in the state socialist Czechoslovakia; others have been manufactured and marketed world-wide. Some of them work not only with human but also animal bodies. Some of them are used by lay people at home; others are to be operated by trained practitioners (sometimes physicians only) in consultation rooms. Foregrounding electrical energy, impedance, and electromagnetic waves we look at how these devices make particular versions of human body, organic as well as inorganic agents, and diseases "visible, audible, tangible, knowable" (Mol 2002), and how these enactments travel through and create partial connections within the Czech healthcare system largely dominated by biomedicine.