“Up Against the Medical Industrial Complex:” How Functional Medicine Advances a New Paradigm for Medical Knowledge

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Epistemologies

Abstract

Functional medicine, an underexamined area of precision medicine, lies at the intersection of basic science and medical practice. It raises important questions about epistemological and moral divisions within the medical profession, given that functional medicine physicians (FMPs) embrace an epistemology that violates biomedicine’s theory of disease causation. Drawing on Fligstein and McAdams’s (2011) theory of strategic action fields, this article uses 50 in-depth interviews with FMPs and field pioneers to examine how they sustain their professional-moral mandate while advancing a project that appears to undermine it. This study finds that FMPs employ three paradoxical moral narratives related to randomized control trial-derived evidence to challenge the foundations of medical knowledge while preserving their commitment to a moral medicine informed by science. This study adds to a growing body of humanistic and sociological literature on precision medicine’s ethical implications, questioning whether it can realize all the benefits it promises.

Author

• Sara Snitselaar, UChicago