Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America. By Candy Gunther Brown. New York: Oxford University Press2013. 336 pp. $29.95 hardcover.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America . By Candy Gunther Brown . New York : Oxford University Press 2013. 336 pp. $29.95 hardcover.Book Reviews and NotesOne summer not long ago I passed many hours in a public library reading through shelves of popular books on complementary and medicine (CAM). Before long, their arguments became recognizable and familiar as positions in a high stakes discursive field. Were alternative and integrative modalities--herbs, homeopathy, yoga, Reiki, Alexander Technique, acupuncture--scientifically or medically sound? Liberating or harmful? Religious or spiritual? Helpful or harmful? Authors sporting letters after their last names (M.D., Ph.D., MSW, M.Div., etc.) occupy the various agreed-upon positions in this field. There were debunkers, the voices of reason, true believers, feminist and scientific and religious critics of biomedical excess, and cautionary skeptics. Despite their differences in opinion they all agreed broadly on what CAM was and what they were arguing about. There was also broad agreement in the genre on what expertise entailed, how scientific, popular, and historical literature could be used, and even on favored interpretive tropes and themes. It was an interesting exercise to read these books and I learned quite a bit about the stakes of contemporary health and body politics in the United States. But it taught me little about the history, religion, or sociology of complementary and medicine.Candy Gunther Brown's Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America falls squarely within this genre of popular writing about CAM. It exemplifies the caveat emptor genre. Brown inhabits the role of a scholarly expert who exposes the hidden religious origins of medicine and explains why knowing about these origins matter. In participating in this genre, Brown also adopts its language of expertise, choosing to shed the historian's metier of close reading and textual analysis in favor of more expansive claims to knowledge. As a consequence, Healing Gods has little to offer to a scholarly audience interested in learning more about American Christians' uses or experience with complementary and medicine. Scholars of American religious history, yoga and traditional Chinese medicine, the history of medicine and science, constitutional law or patients' rights will find Brown's treatment of these topics inadequately supported by conventional scholarly argumentation or interpretation. This is not the only measure for a book (and arguably not the appropriate measure for this one) but its publication by Oxford University Press suggests that such an assessment is not completely inappropriate.Brown's argument can be summarized as such: Complementary and medicine is religious (chapter 1) and, moreover, not Christian in its origins (chapter 3). These non-religious CAM therapies were banished from the halls of medicine in the early twentieth century but have been revived and brought into mainstream biomedicine (introduction, chapter 7). This has happened as promoters of CAM have repackaged and marketed CAM to unsuspecting Americans who are unaware of their real religious roots (introduction, conclusion). CAM continues to thrive even as most CAM therapies have been shown to have little or no positive effect in medical studies (chapter 5). Brown states that Americans are largely unaware of their religious origins, and she thus offers in her even-numbered chapters brief historical overviews of yoga, acupuncture, energy medicine, and chiropractic therapy. Brown further argues however that knowing this history is not enough. She argues that because Americans tend to associate religion with belief and doctrine rather than the body or action, they are unaware of the ways that CAM can carry religious meaning through enactment. …