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Sylvie FAINZANG & Claudie HAXAIRE (ed.)
in allergology use the term exclusively referring to tested immunological reactions of a specific kind (IgE reaction). Since its creation, the use of the term ‘allergy’ and its theoretical foundations were hardly contested5; still now a shared international standard for defining allergy and an effective treatment is lacking. The main debate is whether allergy should include any form of modified biological reaction or only of immunological kind (Kay, 2006). This situation has represented an ideal condition for a massive colonization of allergology by alternative medicine. The discipline has been defined more than once by its practitioners as a ‘Cinderella subject’, middle land between orthodox biomedicine and heterodox medicines. Frequently people decide to consult CAM6 (Bielory, 2002; Ernst, 1998; Schaefer, 2004; Schaefer et alii, 2002) and even if in many cases improvements of symptoms might appear a chimera, often in these contexts patients receive positive feedbacks about their pre-assumption and interpretations of their condition because allergy – both as term and wide concept – is easily accepted by alternative practitioners. Heterodox approaches are many and they might include alternative practitioners but also biomedical doctors practicing any kind of ecologic, environmental or alternative medicine. Unless specificities, what they all have in common is the great consideration given to environmental factors and an ecologicholistic view on health and illness, which is contrasting with the reductionism of orthodox biomedicine. Non orthodox approaches legitimise a wide use of the concept linked to ‘allergy’, attempting to treat allergic symptoms either involving immunological reactions or not. Nowadays alternative medicines play a fundamental role in medicalisation, provoking what has been called as a ‘medicalisation profane’ (Fassin, 1998). This
5 Since the start of allergology there was a clash between the clinic and the theory, because on one hand practitioners needed a term and a therapy to label idiosyncratic conditions but, on the other hand, researchers were contesting a unified theoretical frame of explanation for different reactions of hypersensitivity (offered by the concept of allergy). 6
Complementary and alternative medicine.