Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has become widely popular in many countries, yet little is known about the actual training of CAM practitioners. This article employs ethnographic research methods to closely examine the meaning-making processes used in such training at a complementary and alternative medical college. It delineates how CAM practitioners in training, specialising in naturopathy, make sense of alternative medical knowledge and transform it into medical truth. The study indicates that the core of CAM training rests on overturning the biomedical epistemological hierarchy between the objectification of disease and the experience of illness through extended intersubjective sharing by instructors and students. This study therefore adds to the extensive CAM literature by carefully examining the way naturopathic knowledge is inculcated during practitioner training. The emerging insight is that introspection and the search for authenticity, a central narrative of modernity, have become powerful resources in CAM’s construction of alternative medical truth.

补充和替代医学（CAM）在许多国家已经广泛普及，但对CAM从业人员的实际培训知之甚少。本文采用人种学研究方法来仔细研究互补和替代医学学院在此类培训中使用的意义生成过程。它描述了专门从事自然疗法培训的CAM从业者如何理解替代医学知识并将其转化为医学真理。研究表明，CAM培训的核心在于通过教师和学生之间的主体间共享，推翻疾病客观化和疾病经历之间的生物医学认识论体系。因此，本研究通过仔细检查在从业人员培训期间灌输自然疗法知识的方式，增加了广泛的CAM文献。新兴的见解是，内省和对真实性的追求（现代性的中心叙述）已成为CAM构建替代医学真理的强大资源。