Asymmetrical Conversations

<p> Ideas about health are reinforced by institutions and their corresponding practices such as donning a patient's gown in a hospital or prostrating before a healing shrine. Even though we are socialized into regarding such ideologies as natural and unproblematic we sometimes seek to bypass circumvent or even transcend the dominant ideologies of our cultures as they are manifested in the institutions of health care. The contributors to this volume describe such contestations and circumventions of health ideologies and the blurring of therapeutic boundaries on the basis of case studies from India the South Asian Diaspora and Europe focusing on relations between body mind and spirit in a variety of situations. The result is not always the live and let live medical pluralism that is described in the literature.</p>