Tove Elisabeth Kruse

Understanding unexpected courses of multiple sclerosis among patients using complementary and alternative medicine: A travel from recipient to explorer

Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is frequently used by patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Some MS patients experience unexpected improvements of symptoms, which they relate to their use of CAM. The aim of this study was to obtain knowledge and develop understandings of such self-defined unexpected improvement of MS symptoms. Two cases were constructed based on documents and 12 qualitative interviews. Our aim was not to make generalisations from the cases, but to transfer knowledge as working hypotheses. We identified four health-related change processes: the process of losing bodily competence; the process of developing responsibility; the process of taking control; and the process of choosing CAM. The patients explained unexpected improvements in their MS symptoms as results of their own efforts including their choice and use of CAM. In our theoretical interpretations, we found the patients’ redefinition of history, the concept of treatment and the importance of conventional health care to be essential, and leading to a change of patients’ position towards conventional health care from recipients to explorers. The explorers can be perceived as boundary walkers reflecting limitations within the conventional health care system and as initiators regarding what MS patients find useful in CAM.

Modes of Embodiment in Breast Cancer Patients Using Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Breast cancer patients are frequent users of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). They often have complex reasons for, and experiences from, their use of CAM. Bodily experiences are important and almost unexplored elements in CAM use. Our aim was to explore the meaning and importance of bodily experiences among breast cancer patients who were using CAM as a supplement or an alternative to conventional treatment (CT). Our findings based on qualitative interviews with 13 women suggest that bodily experiences were particularly important when positioned outside conventional health care prior to medical diagnosis and as users of CAM as alternative to CT. We introduce three central modes of embodiment related to CAM use: the right to one’s body, the body used as a gauge, and the body used as a guide. Patients’ positioning between treatment systems should be further explored from a bodily perspective to safeguard and optimize their treatment choices.

Doing pasts: authenticity from the reenactors’ perspective

Abstract This article investigates how authenticity is construed and negotiated in four different fields of reenactment practice in Denmark (Iron Age, Middle Age, World War II and Francis of Assisi). It first outlines some key theoretical positions within recent international academic debate on reenactment and living history. Taking the viewpoint of the reenactors themselves, the article explores and compares how they create, experience and negotiate authenticity in the very process of imitating and embodying pasts. It transpires that authenticity is articulated, construed and evaluated differently, according, inter alia, to whether the primarily purpose is to learn about the past or rather to learn from the past. For some reenactors, the attempt to get as close as possible to the past connects to an ideal of historical accuracy, a standard from which all replicas and performances are measured. Yet a pragmatic recognition that the past can never be recreated completely is constantly present. For other reenactors, the doing of pasts is a way of accessing experiences and values that are felt to have been lost in modernity. At the same time, however, it is all-important to them that the world they imitate is a past that actually existed and not a fictional universe.