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Lay assessments of the efficacy of alternative/complementary therapies: a challenge to medical and expert dominance?

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Evidence-Based Integrative Medicine

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on how lay people assess the efficacy of alternative and/or complementary therapies. While there is a great deal of research on how the effectiveness of these therapies is determined, very little focuses on lay perspectives in assessing their efficacy. This paper is based on a broader qualitative study of people living with Parkinson’s disease who participate in alternative/complementary therapies. Semi-structured interviews were used as a means of gathering data. The conceptual models of efficacy which emerged from the accounts of these people are complex, encompassing a variety of expectations of, and explanations for, efficacy; which, in turn, incorporate elements of alternative ideologies of health and healing, commonsensical beliefs, pragmatic reasoning and biomedical understandings of the workings of the body. This analysis questions the assumption that ‘lay perspectives’ necessarily pose a challenge to expert and medical dominance where assessments of efficacy are concerned.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of New Brunswick, PO Box 4400, Fredericton, New Brunswick, E3B 5A3, Canada

    Jacqueline Low

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Low, J. Lay assessments of the efficacy of alternative/complementary therapies: a challenge to medical and expert dominance?. Evid-Based-Integrative-Med 1, 65–76 (2004). https://doi.org/10.2165/01197065-200301010-00011

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