Promoting interactional health equity through (Complementary and Integrative Health) talk during clinical encounters

Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) is recognized as a set of modalities to bolster health and well-being often outside of standard biomedical practice. How people discuss CIH with their biomedical providers is a microcosm for health communication more generally. In this Discussion, we propose a revision of the Street et al. (2009) conceptual framework to illustrate how CIH talk during a clinical encounter has the potential to contribute to (or detract from) interactional health equity. We use discourse analytic techniques to re-analyze two digitally recorded biomedical encounters. Two case studies are re-analyzed to illustrate how clinician-client conversation about CIH during a clinical encounter might lead to interactional health equity. Interactions with clinicians can be challenging due to differences in knowledge about biomedicine, administrative processes, and even navigating interpersonal relationships. How a clinician responds can either center a biomedical agenda in the Voice of Medicine or help ratify a patient’s agenda in the Voice of the Lifeworld. How clinicians and patients negotiate CIH talk is conceptually linked with immediate interactional outcomes. In populations in which patients/caregivers or their extended communities may already have low trust in biomedicine, a mistrustful therapeutic alliance, or history of discrimination, disattention of the Lifeworld and avoiding talk about CIH has the possibility of exacerbating inequities. Every turn at talk during a clinical encounter has the potential to foster increased social participation which, in turn, may contribute to health outcomes and influence patient and community well-being at individual, community, and institutional levels. CIH talk can open space for patients to actively participate in healthcare by incorporating the patients’ Lifeworld into the clinical encounter and can contribute to interactional health equity within clinical encounters. •Health equity is often structural but also includes an interactional dimension.•Complementary and Integrative Health (CIH) is widely used and discussed.•Clinical encounters create opportunities to ratify patient participation in CIH talk.•Interactional health equity requires balancing Voices of Medicine and Lifeworld.•Interactional outcomes have a conceptual relationship to health equity and outcomes.