Older adults' use of complementary and alternative medical therapies to resist biomedicalization of aging

• This study assesses the subjective views a group of older adult users of CAM therapies have of aging, health, healing, and self care.
• Four themes emerge as in part explaining the appeal of CAM therapies for older adults: “intergenerational angst”; “iatrogenesis”; “aging as deterioration”; and “optimistic alternatives”.
• In a cultural context in which aging has been transformed into a medical matter, older adults who seek out CAM do so as part of an effort to gain individual control over their aging bodies and health.

Taking its cue from Estes and Binney's (1989) assertion that individual and subjective views of aging often reflect a hegemony characteristic of biomedicalization, this study assesses the subjective views that a group of older adult users of CAM therapies have of aging, health, healing, and self care. Reflexive sociological interviews with 24 men and women over the age of 55 are used to show how participants use CAM as an embodied means to resist biomedicalization of aging. Four themes emerge as in part explaining the appeal of CAM therapies for older adults: “intergenerational angst”; “iatrogenesis”; “aging as deterioration”; and “optimistic alternatives”. In a cultural context in which aging has been transformed into a medical matter, older adults who seek out CAM do so as part of an effort to gain individual control over their aging bodies and health. These findings provide further evidence that older adults have adopted discourses of individual responsibility for health through self care behavior and that the growing trend towards therapeutic pluralism entails both elements of medicalization and demedicalization.