The cultural production of Bioterapia: Psychic healing and the natural medicine movement in Slovakia

摘要: Despite powerful opposition, natural medicine (NM) has achieved a toe-hold in the state-run biomedical system Slovak Republic. The physician-leader of NM movement hopes to leverage his ministerial post as 'supreme expert' and interlocking clinical research facilities achieve complex, unified health care under control medical doctors. This model simultaneously reinforces hegemony decenters classical by substituting bioenergetical paradigm. includes, among other diagnostic healing modalities, acupuncture, herbal therapies, bee therapy, reflexology, iridology. However, its paradigmatic form is bioterapia, focus this paper. Bioterapia psychic or therapeutic touch. According practitioners, it based on bioenergetic information-processing principles. Conceptually, bioterapia unifies psyche, soma energy dimensions human body situates organism an extended transpersonal social, physical cosmological environment. scientized medicalized reconstruction folk tradition whose appropriation secularized re-sacralized re-locating practice from lay healers doctors, religious domain venerated scientific domain, deviant science normal science. reconfiguration into part creation academic secular parapsychology former Soviet Bloc late 1960s, illustrates use privileged discourse for cultural production that seems have both supported subverted regime.