Experiments in response-ability: Integrative medicine, rebel doctors and expanding repertoires of care

Recent years have seen the progressive expansion of Integrative Medicine (IM) as a self-proclaimed movement of medical professionals aiming to radically re-orient medicine's reductionist focus on disease and treatment towards a new approach centred on health and healing. Despite its increasing mainstream visibility, IM remains under-theorised in the social sciences and is often dismissed as a repackaged version of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). As a result, little scholarly attention has been paid to the kinds of questions that IM poses to conventional medicine, or, indeed, why it appears to capture the imagination of an ever-growing number of medical practitioners discontent with the status quo. Based on a pilot study with leading IM doctors in the UK conducted in 2023-24, this paper argues that their engagement with IM reflects a deep disconcertment with the conceptual and practical limitations of conventional medical practice. Rather than a coherent field of theory and practice, IM emerges as a heterogenous space for problematising medicine's perceived limitations and for experimenting with new modes of 'response-ability'; that is, new ways of engaging with the situated demands of therapeutic encounters. While questions remain about IM's ability to unsettle some of the problematic conceptual assumptions that inform current medical orthodoxies, I argue that it offers not just a compelling object for social scientific inquiry but also a potential site from within which to reimagine what a different medicine might look like.