A protest vote? Users of anti-ageing medicine talk back

Abstract

While anti-ageing medicine may be defined by efforts to control human aging, individual motivation to utilise anti-ageing medicine proves to be multifaceted. Qualitative, in-depth interviews with 15 people who have used anti-ageing medicine reveal that the turn to anti-ageing medicine may be more about disillusionment with allopathic medicine than it is about controlling bodily aging. By contextualising people’s use of anti-ageing medicine within their lifelong body regimen ‘careers’, and looking closely at the first career sequence, which is characterised by a questioning of tradition – the tradition of allopathic medicine – new perspectives behind the rise of anti-ageing medicine are offered. Shared grievances with mainstream medicine tend to be situated around both the medical delivery and the medical treatment. Rather than reject the values associated with biomedicine, as is often the case with alternative health enthusiasts (Siahpush 1998), those using anti-ageing medicine seek out an ‘alternative’ biomedicine that they perceive to offer more satisfactory solutions to their problems.