Healing is a contested field, and talking about healing from the perspective of the Study of Religion involves many risks. In our experience, studying traditional, complementary, and alternative medicines inevitably leads to accusations of partiality: one is blamed either for taking sides in favor of biomedicine and against alternative healing systems, or for advocating alternative healing systems without pointing out the alleged risks they imply. In presenting papers on the topic, we have often felt that our audience tended to prick up their ears on hearing what they feared, expecting us to take sides in either promoting or condemning biomedicine or alternative medicine. This experience, which reinforced our desire to approach this topic from an unbiased perspective, is one reason why this publication is so important to us.This collection has benefitted from the support of many people. Laura Feldt und Gregory Alles shared our interest in not subjecting any kind of healing system to value judgements, and their comments helped us to improve the consistency of our arguments. We are also grateful to Johannes Quack for feedback on our initial drafts. Our sincerest thanks go to Robert Parkin for his linguistic proof-reading; his flexibility, patience, and feeling for language were of invaluable value. Julia Swoboda and Mirjam Aeschbach undertook the task of formatting and formally proof-reading the manuscript. Our heartfelt thanks go to them both for their academic expertise and their invariable good spirits in having to cope with complex formatting rules.Finally, we thank all of our authors. Some of them revised their papers despite looming deadlines for their PhD theses or the challenges of pregnancy and parenthood. By happy coincidence, three children were born during the preparation of this publication.
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