Demarcating Medicine's Boundaries: Constituting and Categorizing in the Journals of the American Medical Association

Abstract

This article examines professional boundary work in a set of medical journal theme issues about complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Whereas these journals claim as their collective goal to bridge and blur boundaries between mainstream and alternative medicine, this article identifies and describes two chief rhetorical strategies through which the journals instead bolster and even expand those boundaries. These two strategies, constituting and categorizing, appear central to the demarcation of biomedical boundaries vis-à-vis CAM.

Keywords:

• complementary and alternative medicine
• constituting and categorizing
• medical journal articles
• professional discourse
• rhetoric of science and medicine

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colleen Derkatch

Colleen Derkatch is assistant professor of rhetoric in the Department of English at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.