Alternative Paths to Wellness (The Huffington Post)

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In an opinion piece published by The Huffington Post, Associate Professor of Anthropology Sienna Craig writes that a person’s health care choices are not just about deciding on traditional or alternative treatment.

Choosing one’s path to personal wellness is also a political act with winners and losers, she writes.

“Using traditional therapies and their ‘complementary and alternative’ derivatives pulls us into a web of connection that demands we ask different kinds of questions about what makes for ‘good’ health care and what global health inequity looks like,” Craig writes. “Beyond entering into the ‘kingdom of the sick,’ as Susan Sontag calls illness, when the search for a coveted formula may contain endangered species or hinge on threatened forms of knowledge, we are entering into another kind of kingdom: a place of culture and commodification, politics and profit.”

Craig is chair of the Department of Anthropology and a Dartmouth Public Voices fellow.

Read the full opinion piece, published 3/31/14 by The Huffington Post.

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