Nowadays, a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are manoeuvring this medical plurality. Although wideranging in scope and covering areas as diverse as India, Ecuador, Ghana and Norway, central to all contributions is the observation that technologies of healing are founded on socially learned and to some extent fluid experiences of body and self.

Nowadays a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are manoeuvring this medical plurality. Although wideranging in scope and covering areas as diverse as India, Ecuador, Ghana and Norway, central to all contributions is the observation that technologies of healing are founded on socially learned and to some extent fluid experiences of body and self.

This volume combines a number of examinations of alternative therapies, in widely diverging contexts, under the title of communication. The contributions discuss the difficult question of communication or non-communication between East and West, or between the alternative and the established, in both therapeutic and scientific worlds. In addition, the discussion of the body, or of nature itself, as a communicating medium, in command of its own organising and healing resources, is breached. This third volume contains contributions from areas such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, medicine, and natural science. In 1995, the three year old International Network for Research on Alternative Therapies invited outstanding international researchers to present their work under the heading, "Communication in and about Alternative Therapies". The most significant results of that seminar, held in Copenhagen, are published here.

The articles in this final volume fall into two main themes, lifestyle and medical paradigms. By using lifestyle as the point of departure for describing the use and users of alternative treatment, research moves beyond the traditional scientific research categories. Alternative treatments foremost function is thus perceived to be the creation of identity. The scientific theoretical concept of paradigm leads the discussion to differentiate between conventional and alternative treatment seen in relation to the basic science or knowledge behind them. How is it possible to characterise an eventual break with tradition? Finally, this volume of Studies presents several documents related to the termination of INRAT; an article concerning the methodological problems connected with the network's research area, a series of abstracts on methodology submitted by network participants, and the organising committee's final report on the research project to the Research Council of the Humanities in Denmark.