"Have you seen your aura lately?" examining boundary-work in holistic health pamphlets.

An increasing number of people in the United States are using holistic therapies. Both encouraging and informing this trend in growth, printed leaflets are a popular and important medium for holistic health practitioners. Using a discourse analytic approach, the author analyzed pamphlets and printed texts distributed at a holistic health fair. These texts reflect and construct specific understandings of holistic health and proper health care. Understood through the notion of boundary-work, pamphlets demarcated holism as the proper way of conceptualizing health and health care. However, holistic medicine's boundaries are quite porous, as these practices are also legitimized through the use of scientific conventions and the practice of integration, both commonly associated with biomedicine.