Abstract
The contestation of expertise is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the field of health and well-being, on which this article focuses. A multitude of practices and communities that stand in contentious relationships with established forms of medical expertise and promote personalised modes of self-care have proliferated across Euro-American societies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in three domains – body–mind–spirit therapies, vaccine hesitancy and consumer-grade digital self-tracking – we map such practices through the concept of ‘everyday fringe medicine’. The concept of everyday fringe medicine enables us to bring together various critical health and well-being practices and to unravel the complex modes of contestation and appreciation of the medical establishment that are articulated within them. We find three critiques of the medical establishment – critiques of medical knowledge production, professional practices and the knowledge base – which make visible the complexities related to public understandings of science within everyday fringe medicine.
Highlights
Sociologists of science have long been drawing attention to the changing status of expertise in contemporary societies (Collins, 2014; Wilcox, 2010; Wyatt et al, 2010)
The article contributes to the literature on the public understanding of science and the sociology of health expertise in three ways: first, by developing the novel conceptual tool of everyday fringe medicine’ (EFM) to theorise the logics of everyday self-care practices and their relationships to medical knowledge and practices; second, by empirically highlighting the complexity of critiques of the medical establishment among EFM users and third, by making visible the complexities related to the public understanding of science
We have suggested the concept of EFM to bring together various critical health and well-being practices and to unravel the complex modes of contestation and appreciation of the medical establishment articulated within them
Summary
The contestation of expertise is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in the field of health and well-being, on which this article focuses. We illustrate this complexity by introducing three forms of critique of the medical establishment articulated within EFM that show how EFM practices both challenge and collaborate with biomedical modes of health expertise and science By addressing these questions, the article contributes to the literature on the public understanding of science and the sociology of health expertise in three ways: first, by developing the novel conceptual tool of EFM to theorise the logics of everyday self-care practices and their relationships to medical knowledge and practices; second, by empirically highlighting the complexity of critiques of the medical establishment among EFM users and third, by making visible the complexities related to the public understanding of science. We will illustrate three forms of critique emerging in our ethnographic materials, before providing conclusions
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