Authors
Issue Date
2014-01Type
Thesis or Dissertation
Abstract
In this dissertation, I examine how CAM is discursively constructed
in four major biomedical journals, The Journal of the American Medical
Association, Nature, Science, and The New England Journal of Medicine,
and three widely known women's popular health media sites, The Dr. Oz
Show, Women's Health magazine, and Prevention magazine, and argue that
risk is a major trope in the construction of CAM. In my analysis, I
found that medical journals use risk discursively to circumscribe the
extent to which CAM is accepted in the mainstream medical community and
to reinforce institutional boundaries. In women's popular health media, I
found that risk is used discursively to reinforce the importance of
conventional beauty standards while also supporting CAM as a valid
supplement to conventional medicine by emphasizing how using CAM may
enhance or improve health. Finally, I argue that although medical
journals use the risk of CAM to validate professional norms, and women's
health media conflate health and appearance using CAM, women's popular
health media also provide specific examples of resistance against both
the construction of the riskiness of CAM by medical journals and the
patriarchal discourses that inflect the popular media's coverage of CAM.
Description
University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation.January 2014. Major:
Communication Studies. Advisor: Mary Douglas Vavrus. 1 computer file
(PDF); iv, 259 pages.
Suggested Citation
Branson, Carolina.
(2014).
The discursive construction of complementary and
Alternative Medicine (CAM) in women's popular health media and medical
journals.
Retrieved from the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy,
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/162632.
