Homœopathy, once an accepted form of medicine, is currently under attack in Australia, so much so that its very existence is threatened. To illustrate techniques of marginalisation of homœopathy in Australia, the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council’s (NHMRC) report of 2015 is examined. As there is no standard framework or classification of marginalisation techniques, boundary work ideas were used to suggest techniques used in the process of marginalisation. To condemn homœopathy, the NHMRC used at least eight techniques: authority, asserting protection of autonomy, exclusion, double standards, normalisation, denigration, censorship, expansion and diversion. The NHMRC report is a revealing example of how biomedicine uses various tactics to marginalise alternative therapies, thereby maintaining biomedicine’s dominant position.
PAGES
171 – 192
DOI
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Issues
Also in this issue:
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Agnes Horvath, Magic and the Will to Science: A Political Anthropology of Liminal Technicality
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Gibson Burrell, Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Friends, Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at our Universities
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Bas de Boer, How Scientific Instruments Speak: Postphenomenology and Technological Mediations in Neuroscientific Practice
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Bjørn Lomborg, False Alarm
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How does innovation arise in the bicycle sector? The users’ role and their betrayal in the case of the ‘gravel bike’