The Emergence of Trust in Clinics of Alternative Medicine

The demand for the services from practitioners of alternative medicine has increased within the last decades in those nations in which western scientific evidence has become the basis for healthcare. This paradox has been the impetus for this paper to examine how trust between practitioners and users emerges in clinics of alternative medicine where practitioners are self-regulated and the users pay out of their own pockets for attending non-authorised treatments with very limited scientific evidence of effects. Trust is a key concept for healthcare outcomes and eventually widespread in research of health. However, most studies focus on formalised institutional settings and only few sociological studies of trust have contributed knowledge into how alternative practitioners win their clients’ trust. Drawing on three qualitative studies (in sum 124 in-depth interviews and 3 focus groups) of different forms of alternative medicine, conducted in Denmark from 2006 to 2009, we explore how uncertainties are managed and trust emerges in the treatment encounter. By informing the empirical findings with a concept of intersubjective trust (i.e. Barbalet 2009), experiences among clients and practitioners are in focus to contributing new empirical insights on how trust is performed since the basis for trust is not evident. The analysis demonstrates that situated trust in the alternative encounter comprises relational, bodily as well as material aspects.