Nomad RSI - Therapeutic diversity and the environment

Edited by Olivier Schmitz (2006), Paris: Karthala, 279p.
Language: French.

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Despite the authority biomedicine holds in treating illnesses in contemporary western societies, a growing part of their populations now have recourse to other therapeutic methods. What does this multitude of healthcare practices called “alternative”, “parallel” or even “natural”, mean to the public and to the practitioners? Are they, as has been said of traditional healers, the missing part of biomedicine, which has in its historical development progressively separated the social from the biological and the material from the spiritual? The chapters which make up this volume provide answers to these queries, by offering singular and previously unpublished studies of a sample of “different” healing practices such as yoga, Qigong, geo-biology, magnotherapy and neo-shamanism. Social science specialists subsequently point out the remarkable plasticity in the field of healthcare practices and offer some analyses. Les médecines en parallèle sheds light on these medical alternatives and on the profound social reorganizations of which they are the reflection.

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