Political citizens, consumers, or passive patients? Imagined audiences in the complementary medicine debate

ABSTRACT

This is a content analysis (2011-2017) of news stories referring to an Australian-based lobby group called the Friends of Science in Medicine (FSM) who have been active in their denouncement of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in Australia. Of particular interest are the models of biocommunicability that dominated these news stories. Drawing from the works of Briggs and Hallin, these biocommunicability models enable us to consider whether the news story imagines its audience as passive patients, active patient-consumers, or engaged citizens in the public sphere. Of 76 articles, public sphere stories were the most frequent (n=54) followed by patient-consumer reports (n=36). Prioritising the voices of FSM lobbyists, news stories address their audiences as politically astute citizens or active consumers negotiating a range of healthcare options in an ambiguous healthcare landscape. These models correlate with framings of CAM as lucrative and unethical, illegitimate, with a poor evidence base.

KEYWORDS:

• Biocommunicability
• health reporting
• content analysis
• complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very constructive feedback and guidance for this article. I would also like to thank John Flood for offering comments and suggestions on the paper before submission.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.scienceinmedicine.org.au/welcome-message/.

2. I observed a similar pattern in my previous analysis of media reports about herbal medicine from 2005 to 2010, which indicated that the potential efficacy of plant medicines received a substantial rate of acknowledgement in the news stories, along with the predominance of risk framings about them (Lewis, 2015, 2011a)

3. Saks (2003) offers evidence of this process.

4. CAM is often defined by its ‘otherness’, its marginalisation from mainstream medicine, rather than a phenomenon in its own right (Brosnan et al., 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Griffith University AEL Research Grant [LHS2251-17SR1].

Notes on contributors

Monique Lewis

Monique Lewis is a communication scholar and sociologist with an interest in sociologies of media, health, and risk. Her research interests include media framings of complementary medicine and medicinal cannabis, as well as health communication ethics and the COVID-19 communication landscape.