Legitimating complementary therapies in the NHS: Campaigning, care and epistemic labour

Dodworth, K. and Stewart, E. (2022) Legitimating complementary therapies in the NHS: Campaigning, care and epistemic labour. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 26(2), pp. 244-262. (doi: 10.1177/1363459320931916) (PMID:32508138) (PMCID:PMC8928231)

Abstract

Questions of legitimacy loom large in debates about the funding and regulation of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in contemporary health systems. CAM’s growth in popularity is often portrayed as a potential clash between clinical, state and scientific legitimacies and legitimacy derived from the broader public. CAM’s ‘publics’, however, are often backgrounded in studies of the legitimacy of CAM and present only as a barometer of the legitimating efforts of others. This article foregrounds the epistemic work of one public’s effort to legitimate CAM within the UK’s National Health Service: the campaign to ‘save’ Glasgow’s Centre for Integrative Care (CIC). Campaigners skilfully intertwined ‘experiential’ knowledge of the value of CIC care with ‘credentialed’ knowledge regarding best clinical and managerial practice. They did so in ways that were pragmatic as well as purist, reformist as well as oppositional. We argue for legitimation as negotiated practice over legitimacy as a stable state, and as labour borne by various publics as they insert themselves into matrices of knowledge production and decision-making within wider health care governance.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This paper reports research funded as part of Ellen Stewart’s Chief Scientist Postdoctoral Fellowship (grant number CF/CSO/01).
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Stewart, Professor Ellen
• Authors: Dodworth, K., and Stewart, E.
• College/School: College of Social Sciences > School of Social and Political Sciences > Urban Studies
• Journal Name: Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• ISSN: 1363-4593
• ISSN (Online): 1461-7196
• Published Online: 07 June 2020
• Copyright Holders: Copyright: © The Author(s) 2020
• First Published: First published in Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 26(2): 244-262
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons licence