The moral universe of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM): A cultural-theological reading of mind-body interventions

Despite the fact that biomedical science permits us to explain the vagaries of health and sickness in neutral terms by reference to genetic defects, hormone imbalances, organ pathologies or physiologic impairments, this study will demonstrate that moral interpretations of illness are not only persistent but remarkably, popular.; In the literature generated by practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine or CAM, for example, the physical world of suffering is frequently associated with the ethical world of culpability. Some CAM practitioners—particularly those emphasizing the mind-body connection—assert a direct correlation between an individual's emotional and attitudinal patterns and his or her present (and future) states of well being.; Significantly, though such understandings are designed to provide both conceptual structure and existential meaning to the beleaguered individual's situation, these same beliefs likewise foster speculation that the individual him- or herself has participated in the creation of his or her medical condition and can thus be held accountable for it. In fact, as CAM is presently structured it would be difficult to avoid the conclusion that therapeutic failure is a consequence of moral failure. In the hands of many mind-body CAM practitioners, “taking responsibility” for one's health often seems to have less to do with health promotion or the exercise of positive autonomy and more to do with finding fault and getting one's “‘just’ desert.” Indeed, CAM's understanding of the mind's ability to influence the causation, course and potential cure of all disease, raises important questions about the role of human choice in determining and directing one's health.; Through a close analysis of selected practitioners' texts this study will demonstrate that CAM, as an emerging paradigm of health and illness care, is deeply marbled by the tensions between fate and fault, accident and agency. This assessment of CAM, however, will not be entirely negative. Indeed, this dissertation ends by exploring the ways in which mind-body CAM practitioners recommend taking personal responsibility for one's health as a creative response to one's encounter with finitude.