Healthcare, wellbeing, and the regulation of diversity in healing

While the diversity of healing practices and knowledges is not new, controversies triggered by non-conventional medicines have intensified over the years. Contemporary regulation tends to rely on a core difference between proven and unproven therapies, and on scientific logics, to adjudicate questions of legitimacy, authority and funding. But such focus on science does not easily map onto the multiple ontologies at play in how patients and healers approach healthcare, and has limited the ability of law to adequately engage with non-biomedical healing systems. In the contemporary context, plagued with scarcity and neoliberal logics, such disalignment has become more visible, creating ongoing pressures for the regulation of healthcare. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed healers thrive in this highly commercialized environment, where people seek healthcare outside the state-regulated healthcare system. In this chapter, we analyse these tensions and challenges as emerging, in part, from the difficulty for law to respond to multiple ontological worlds. At the same time, we draw on scholarship on vulnerability and care, to explore how healing could be ordered and regulated if we were to decentre the idea of evidence from one of pure rationale.