Pre-empting 'trouble' in the homoeopathic consultation

Despite high levels of usage by patients, a significant barrier to the widespread integration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) into mainstream healthcare is the lack of acceptable evidence relating to how modalities actually work, and how effective they really are. This can create problems for CAM practitioners at an interactional level. How they explain treatment processes to patients, and deal with the introduction of issues which are often at odds with conventional medical paradigms needs to be approached carefully if credibility and therapeutic alignment are to be maintained. This article utilises conversation analysis (CA) to explore some of the ways in which the practitioners of one particular CAM modality - homoeopathy - manage this potentially difficult interactional arena with new patients. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.