Lay constructions of HIV and complementary therapy use11A previous draft of this paper was presented at the 14th World Congress of Sociology, International Sociological Association, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 1998.

This study examines the meanings that individuals with HIV attach to their use of complementary therapies. A qualitative analysis of 66 interviews completed between 1993 and 1998 showed that complementary therapies represent different things for these individuals--a health maintenance strategy, a healing strategy, an alternative to Western medicine, a way of mitigating the side-effects of drug therapies, a strategy for maximizing quality of …