Challenging medicine? Bodybuilding, drugs and risk

This paper draws on data from a qualitative study of bodybuilding and drug-taking. It discusses the ambiguous role of medicine as a source of knowledge and expertise among participants who systematically disavow medical pronouncements on the uses and dangers of 'physique-enhancing' drugs. Empirical data on perceptions of the medical profession, risk, and bodybuilders' various sources of ethno-scientific knowledge, suggest that medicine is simply one 'authority' among many in the construction of the self and body within late modernity. These ethnographic observations correlate with sociological claims that medical orthodoxy is currently being subjected to an external critique and that implicit trust in both the individuals who practice medicine and the underlying system of knowledge may have been weakening.