3 - Miracle Cures as Non-Biomedical Practices

Summary

The naming of things matters. What we decide to call a thing, however arbitrarily, does not merely provide us with a convenient point of reference for that thing; the act of naming enlists the empirical subject in a web of meanings that both precedes it and is produced by it. Calling a range of therapeutic modalities ‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’ has the effect of clarifying and solidifying what it means to be ‘scientific’, while at the same time alienating and marginalizing what lies outside of this scientific framework. Once a naming convention has become stabilized, the semantic network built around this name is anything but arbitrary. Once we have decided that a medicine is ‘unorthodox’ or ‘traditional’, for example, it is less straightforward to associate it with things like ‘rigour’, ‘efficacy’, or ‘government funding’. Names represent the empirical object as they designate general qualities and substances that sustain the possibility of discourse about that object; it is through this discursivity of language that the construction of knowledge becomes possible. Names as signifiers, similar to all of language, are not always perfect; their imperfections and errors, however, record what has been learned and allow for the progression of knowledge through judgement of what is being proposed, articulated, and derived from naming conventions.

Some naming activities are more formal and formalized than others. The naming of specialties within scientific medicine, for example, has grown increasingly systematic and narrowly focused. The General Medical Council (GMC) in the UK records more than 65 specialties and 31 sub-specialties in formal biomedical pedagogy; the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) records more than 160 specialties and subspecialties, while the Medical Board of Australia (MBA) recognizes over 80 scientific medical specialties and fields of specialty practice (MBA, 2018; AAMC, 2023; GMC, 2023). The naming of specialities inevitably informs practice; by the mid-1950s, medical specialization had become a fundamental characteristic of biomedicine (Weisz, 2006). At the same time, the naming of non-Western, non-scientific therapeutic modalities in scholarly literature proliferates in a much less systematic manner. This contrast is not incidental; it is the result of a structural reordering of medical epistemology at the dawn of clinical sciences.

Using a network approach, this chapter analyzes the naming conventions in scholarly knowledge produced about the therapeutic knowledge and practices that precede and persist alongside biomedical knowledge.