Holistic sickening: breast cancer and the discursive worlds of complementary and alternative practitioners

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of holistic sickening to the sociological literature on illness narratives. Drawing on interviews with 46 Boston-area complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practitioners who treat breast cancer patients, we found that the CAM practitioners redefine their patients' breast cancer diagnoses in ways that expand and transform their illness, sometimes into a lifetime journey. The practitioners, for the most part, espouse broad and complex etiological frameworks that help give meaning to the woman's cancer. They tend to speak about breast cancer as a symptom of problems that exceed the cancer itself, at times suggesting that women are responsible, to some extent, for their own breast cancer. The practitioners articulate holistic philosophies that describe healing as open-ended with correspondingly expansive definitions of what it means to be healed, rarely articulating clear ways of conceptualising or measuring the efficacy of their own treatments. Their use of expansive and detailed etiological frameworks alongside vague and unelaborated efficacy frameworks make up the holistic sickening phenomenon described in this paper.

Striving for self-improvement: alternative medicine considered as technologies of enhancement

“…Alternative medicine is integrated into a 'culture of proactive self-care', Ziguras notes (2004, p. 56). The therapies cover a large and diverse range of interventions, but in general they are presented by the practitioners as working with natural healing forces of the body (e.g., Sered and Agigian, 2008). Thus, the role of the practitioner often is to facilitate the clients' capacities for selfhealing.…”

Criminalized Women and Twelve Step Programs

“…Both inside and outside the correctional system women tend to be treated as especially likely to suffer from physical and emotional pathology and women's normal life-processes may be treated as quasi-pathological (for example, rates of caesarian sections reaching almost 50% in some hospitals, the invention of "syndromes" like PMS, and the wholesale pushing of hormone replacement therapy on healthy middle-aged women; cf. Lorber and Moore 1992).Contemporary American women make far greater use than men of self-help groups and holistic therapies, some of which attribute women's illness and pain to "feminine" character traits such as being too sensitive or emotionally dependent, or to the penchant of contemporary women to reject "natural" female behaviors and social roles (cf Sered and Agigian 2008;cf.TaUen 1990;Kaminer 1992).…”

“…In sum, Crawford seems to be describing a highly classist and implicitly sexist cultural move towards defining all that is good in terms of health (cf. Townend 2009), a move that easily slides into the New Age victim blaming notion that one gets the diseases that one, in some way, wants, deserves or self-creates (Sered and Agigian 2008).…”

Reading Friedan: Toward a Feminist Articulation of Heart Disease

“…She does not instruct the reader as an individual to balance work and home in order to achieve health, which would accord with either much older ideas about the purpose of medicine as restoring balance among vital forces or with the advice of contemporary self-help books. Neither is Friedan's holism like contemporary 'holistic healing', in which the therapeutic focus and attendant locus of disease in the bodies of individual women can put at least as high a burden on individual women to achieve health as allopathic medicine does (Sered and Agigian, 2008). Indeed, Friedan's project is not part of the 'will to truth' that so many feminist activists and masculinist scientists share, that privileges individualized knowledge and overemphasizes individuals' responsibility for reducing risk (Yadlon, 1997).…”