Alternative medicine

The Alternative medicine project entails research into the functions and meanings of contemporary forms of belief and healing as well as alternative, non-standard, and integrative forms of medication and treatment. Based on surveys, field work, and media analyses, the broad expansion and growing popularity of non-medical healing methods in the Netherlands (and even more so, in the Western world) will be investigated. This involves a sociocultural approach to the phenomenon in which the question of efficacy (“does it work?”) is not up for discussion, but rather the research poses the issues of why people are becoming increasingly more open to these methods, the ways in which they are put into practice, and how they relate to the medical world.