Nowadays a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are manoeuvring this medical plurality. Although wideranging in scope and covering areas as diverse as India, Ecuador, Ghana and Norway, central to all contributions is the observation that technologies of healing are founded on socially learned and to some extent fluid experiences of body and self.


Helle Johannessen had a PhD in anthropology from University of Copenhagen and conducted research and teaching in medical anthropology from the mid-1980s. She was associate professor at the Institute of Public Health, University of Southern Denmark, where she was head of a research unit and a PhD program for social studies in medicine. In her research she studied medical pluralism in Denmark and Europe. She was involved with a comparative study of the use of complementary medicine among cancer patients in Denmark, Italy and India.