Medicine, rhetoric and undermining: managing credibility in homeopathic practice

Abstract

This article examines homeopathic practitioners 'real life' accounts, and illustrates the ways in which they negotiate their homeopathic practices as contingently formulated ongoing social events in research interview settings. Interview transcripts were analysed in a qualitative framework using discourse analysis. The findings show that practitioners construct homeopathy and defend their own individual practices either by 'alignment-with-medicine' or by 'boosting-the-credibility-of-homeopathy'. Homeopathy is also negotiated and sustained as an 'alternative' to notions of conventional medicine, which is the accepted yardstick for practice or as a practice that is portrayed as problematic. Overall, managing personal credibility is accomplished through specific ways of accounting that tend to marginalise homeopathy. Developing and establishing homeopathic practice further as a discipline in its own right is offered as a 'nucleus' to reduce continuing marginalisation. 2008 The Faculty of Homeopathy.