Bodies inside bodies : examining the use of helminthic therapy and its challenge to popular and biomedical discourses

 Parasites have long been understood as disease causing organisms that invade the bodies of their hosts and live at their hosts' expense. But this understanding of parasites has begun to change. With the rise of helminthic therapy, the use of parasites to treat autoimmune disease, biomedical researchers and lay individuals alike are beginning to recognize the potential benefits of hosting some species of parasites. Given the novelty of helminthic therapy, to date, academic research surrounding it has largely been from a biomedical perspective. Thus it focuses almost exclusively on the safety and efficacy of the therapy. While such a tack is important, it ignores the social context surrounding the therapy's rise and fails to consider how health discourses are perpetuated and contested through the research and practice of helminthic therapy. This dissertation empirically examines the practice of this therapy, both as a direction for biomedical research and as an alternative health practice, in an effort to better understand how health knowledge is produced, circulated, applied, and contested. While the therapy is practiced by a relatively small number of people (as of 2015, estimates put the total number of users around 7,000 (Cheng et al., 2015)), it is part of a growing trend in do-it-yourself (DIY) medicine and the mainstreaming of complementary and alternative medicines (CAM). Thus, helminthic therapy offers a lens through which to chart shifting assumptions around 'expertise, ' 'nature, ' 'health, ' and 'risk.' In its examination of helminthic therapy, this dissertation traces the transformation from practice to knowledge, knowledge to discourse, and in turn discourse back to practice. In so doing, this dissertation contributes to the medical/health geography literature a framework for examining how health is produced at the intersection of multiple epistemologies (namely a biomedical epistemology rooted in the scientific method and a DIY epistemology rooted in anecdotal, experiential, and experimental knowledge about one's own body).