Background: The extent to which a health care intervention causes or facilitates health-related change is a key question in research. The need to quantify such change has led to the development of an increasing number of change indicators, to measure what have come to be known as 'outcomes'. In the context of medical research into the efficacy or effectiveness of an intervention the term 'outcomes' has often been interpreted to mean single endpoints with a linear cause and effect link to an external intervention.

Since the 1960s, in Western societies, there has been a striking growth of consumer interest in complementary or alternative medicine (CAM). In order to make this increased popularity intelligible this paper challenges stereotypical images of users' motives and the results of clinical studies of CAM by exploring bodily experiences of acupuncture, reflexology treatments, and mindfulness training. The study draws on 138 in-depth interviews with 46 clients, client diaries and observations of 92 clinical treatments in order to identify bodily experiences of health and care: experiences that are contested between forces of mastery, control and resistance. We discuss why clients continue to use CAM even when the treatments do not help or even after they have been relieved of their physiological or mental problems. The encounter between the client and CAM produces derivative benefits such as a fresh and sustained sense of bodily responsibility that induces new health practices.

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The present article specifies and broadens our understanding of the concept of commensality by investigating what it means to ‘share a meal’. The study utilizes a school meal intervention carried out in Denmark in 2011/2012. It shows how different types of school meal arrangement influence the social life of a school class, and how these arrangements involve strategies of both inclusion and exclusion. Two types of school meals are compared in the intervention study: a hot meal based on Nordic ingredients and the normal Danish school meal arrangement in which children bring lunch packs to school. The study discusses commensality by examining and comparing lunchtime interactions within the same group of children in the two contrasting meal situations. The results fail to confirm the conventional view that shared meals have greater social impacts and benefits than eating individualized foods. The article argues that the social entrepreneurship involved in sharing individual lunch packs might even outweigh some of the benefits of shared meals where everyone is served the same food.

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