Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the practice of natural medicine in Mexico City, and how practitioners of natural medicine challenge existing conceptions of health while subverting biomedical dominance through a focus on the clean or dirty state of the body as an indicator and catalyst for health or illness.

Paper long abstract:

After a century of biomedical dominance in Mexico; during which all forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) were discredited, vilified, or ignored; multiple forms of CAM are now openly being practiced throughout the country. However, almost all CAM is still unrecognised and unregulated by the Mexican Government. Currently, a resurgence of interest in natural healing methods is visible in both the proliferation of shops selling 'natural items' and clinics for natural healing. This interest appears to be due to the population's overall dissatisfaction with the corrupt and underfunded national health system, the lack of conformity by biomedical doctors to Mexican social norms, and the lack of results that patients see after using biomedicine. This paper explores this phenomenon through a version of CAM in Mexico called naturismo, or natural medicine. Drawing on ethnographic data, I discuss the unique medical epistemologies that are utilised within naturismo, which, as I will demonstrate, separate naturismo from both traditional medicine and biomedicine. Using rhetoric about the dichotomy between a clean or dirty body as an indicator for health, and the necessity of a vegetarian diet to regain health, the practitioners of naturismo (los médicos naturistas) attempt to challenge their patients' perceptions about what it means to be healthy, and what a 'good healer' is. Overall, I argue that naturistas appear to be subverting biomedical dominance and challenging pre-existing healthcare and dietary norms in Mexico by looking to and glorifying a pre-Hispanic 'natural' and healthier past.