McClean Stuart
Faculty of Health and Social Care, University of West England, UK.
Sociol Health Illn. 2005 Jul;27(5):628-48. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2005.00459.x.
While the growth in usage and practice of varying forms of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) continues apace, social science has increasingly turned to CAM's often individualistic approach to health and illness. CAM has been perceived as both partly a cause of and a response to the well-documented ideology in modern healthcare of 'individual responsibility for health'. This occasionally manifests in a 'victim-blaming' ideology amongst both orthodox and CAM practitioners alike. These issues emerged as key themes in an ethnographic study of a Centre for spiritual healing in the North of England. By drawing upon a range of qualitative data gained through the researcher's participation at this healing centre, I argue that the healers' focus on individual responsibility for health is not so much a part of the current socio-political health ideology of 'victim-blaming', rather, it is illustrative of an important contemporary social phenomenon: the movement towards the subjectification and personalisation of public life.
尽管各种形式的补充和替代医学（CAM）的使用和实践仍在迅速增长，但社会科学越来越关注CAM通常采用的针对健康和疾病的个人主义方法。CAM被认为既是现代医疗保健中“个人对健康负责”这一有充分记录的意识形态的部分原因，也是对该意识形态的一种回应。这种情况偶尔会在正统医学从业者和CAM从业者中都表现为一种“指责受害者”的意识形态。这些问题在对英格兰北部一个精神治疗中心的人种志研究中成为关键主题。通过利用研究人员在这个治疗中心参与过程中获得的一系列定性数据，我认为治疗师对个人健康责任的关注与其说是当前“指责受害者”的社会政治健康意识形态的一部分，不如说它体现了一个重要的当代社会现象：公共生活走向主观化和个性化的趋势。
