"Milk Makes Me Sick but My Body Needs It": Conflict and Contradiction in the Establishment of Authoritative Knowledge:
Ann V. Millard
Catherine P. Kingfisher
This article takes lactose intolerance as a topic for exploring clashes power, authority, and knowledge in clinical interactions and interpretations oflaywomen. In clinics providing maternal and child care, staff clients jointly produced authoritative knowledge, most often a version biomedicine. The Euroamerican staff tended to give advice that was biologically appropriate for them but not for many of their patients, a process reflecting what we refer to as biocentrism. Resulting information given to pregnant and lactating women and diagnoses of children's growth patterns were inappropriate in some cases, with potentially serious legal and health implications. Clinic staff often unwittingly ignored the efforts of their clients to begin a discussion of discrepancies between their bodily knowledge and clinic advice. Some women created their own syntheses, which supported the ascendancy ofbiomedical knowledge were not in the interests of their own health, [authoritative knowledge, maternal-child health, biocentrism, lactose intolerance, popular medicine, United States]