TY - CHAP

T1 - Healthcare, Well-being, and the Regulation of Diversity in Healing

AU - Cloatre, Emilie

AU - Urquiza, Nayeli

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - While the diversity of healing practices and knowledges is not new, controversies triggered by non-conventional medicines have intensified over the years. Contemporary regulation tends to rely on a core difference between proven and unproven therapies, and on scientific logics, to adjudicate questions of legitimacy, authority and funding. But such focus on science does not easily map onto the multiple ontologies at play in how patients and healers approach healthcare, and has limited the ability of law to adequately engage with non-biomedical healing systems. In the contemporary context, plagued with scarcity and neoliberal logics, such disalignment has become more visible, creating ongoing pressures for the regulation of healthcare. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed healers thrive in this highly commercialised environment, where people seek healthcare outside the state-regulated healthcare system. In this chapter, we analyse these tensions and challenges as emerging, in part, from the difficulty for law to respond to multiple ontological worlds. At the same time, we draw on scholarship on vulnerability and care to explore how healing could be ordered and regulated if we were to decentre the idea of evidence from one of pure rationale.

AB - While the diversity of healing practices and knowledges is not new, controversies triggered by non-conventional medicines have intensified over the years. Contemporary regulation tends to rely on a core difference between proven and unproven therapies, and on scientific logics, to adjudicate questions of legitimacy, authority and funding. But such focus on science does not easily map onto the multiple ontologies at play in how patients and healers approach healthcare, and has limited the ability of law to adequately engage with non-biomedical healing systems. In the contemporary context, plagued with scarcity and neoliberal logics, such disalignment has become more visible, creating ongoing pressures for the regulation of healthcare. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed healers thrive in this highly commercialised environment, where people seek healthcare outside the state-regulated healthcare system. In this chapter, we analyse these tensions and challenges as emerging, in part, from the difficulty for law to respond to multiple ontological worlds. At the same time, we draw on scholarship on vulnerability and care to explore how healing could be ordered and regulated if we were to decentre the idea of evidence from one of pure rationale.

UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42200-4_5

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85143249866&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-42200-4_5

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-42200-4_5

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9783030421991

SN - 9783030422004

T3 - Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies

SP - 91

EP - 116

BT - Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies

ER -