Homeopathy, Western medicine and the discourse of evidence: Negotiating legitimacy in a public online forum

Abstract

This article reports on the analysis of an online forum on the UK’s National Health Service website where participants debated the provision of homeopathy as publicly funded medical treatment. Using membership categorisation analysis, the article looks at how members negotiated a category distinction between homeopathy and ‘orthodox Western medicine’, focusing on the discursive resources that the participants drew on to position each other and the website itself in moral terms. This analysis contributes to our understanding of the institutionalisation of complementary and alternative medicine by demonstrating the strong polarisation of views that are present in the public domain, and the ways that public institutions become held accountable to ideologies of evidence and choice. In this way, the study adds to our growing knowledge about public engagement in pluralistic healthcare systems, showing further the limitations of the ‘rational choice’ assumptions that underlie pluralism.