Reconfiguring health knowledges? Contemporary modes of self-care as ‘everyday fringe medicine’
Pia Vuolanto, Harley Bergroth, Johanna Nurmi, Suvi Salmenniemi
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.