‘Fantastic hands' - But no evidence: The construction of expertise by users of CAM
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‘Fantastic hands' - But no evidence : The construction of expertise by users of CAM. / Pedersen, Inge Kryger; Baarts, Charlotte.
In: Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 71, No. 6, 2010, p. 1068-1075.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Fantastic hands' - But no evidence
T2 - The construction of expertise by users of CAM
AU - Pedersen, Inge Kryger
AU - Baarts, Charlotte
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - Both in the Scandinavian welfare states and elsewhere the private CAM market acts as a health provideralongside the state. There is very limited established scientific evidence for the effects of treatments andoften they are non-authorised. How, then, do users construct and attribute expertise to CAM practitioners?Drawing on 90 in-depth interviews with 30 Danish CAM users of reflexology or acupuncture,three aspects of expertise emerged from the empirical analysis of how the CAM users ascribe legitimacyto the therapies involved. Thus, expertise is: (i) embodied and produced by means other than those usedin evidence-based knowledge or abstract expert systems; (ii) constructed by making a clear-cut divisionbetween the roles and responsibilities of the practitioner and the user; and (iii) constructed on the basisof specific training or education that practitioners have achieved. The expertise that the users seek andconstruct is not necessarily available, and users therefore consult many different kinds of experts. Indoing so, they may themselves become the ‘experts’ in heterogeneous, context-specific dimensions ofknowledge. In conclusion we propose further studies of what lay people can offer to a democratised andcustomer-sensitive system of health care as an area of inquiry that holds promise for providinga sociological approach to the domain of expertise.
AB - Both in the Scandinavian welfare states and elsewhere the private CAM market acts as a health provideralongside the state. There is very limited established scientific evidence for the effects of treatments andoften they are non-authorised. How, then, do users construct and attribute expertise to CAM practitioners?Drawing on 90 in-depth interviews with 30 Danish CAM users of reflexology or acupuncture,three aspects of expertise emerged from the empirical analysis of how the CAM users ascribe legitimacyto the therapies involved. Thus, expertise is: (i) embodied and produced by means other than those usedin evidence-based knowledge or abstract expert systems; (ii) constructed by making a clear-cut divisionbetween the roles and responsibilities of the practitioner and the user; and (iii) constructed on the basisof specific training or education that practitioners have achieved. The expertise that the users seek andconstruct is not necessarily available, and users therefore consult many different kinds of experts. Indoing so, they may themselves become the ‘experts’ in heterogeneous, context-specific dimensions ofknowledge. In conclusion we propose further studies of what lay people can offer to a democratised andcustomer-sensitive system of health care as an area of inquiry that holds promise for providinga sociological approach to the domain of expertise.
U2 - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.06.007
DO - 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.06.007
M3 - Journal article
VL - 71
SP - 1068
EP - 1075
JO - Social Science & Medicine
JF - Social Science & Medicine
SN - 0277-9536
IS - 6
ER -
ID: 13998649