Abstract
Health, illness and medicine are important topics both in science, technology and society studies (STS) and sociology, but they are explored with different approaches and focuses in the two disciplines. Compare to the long-established medical sociology, STS can offer more than new research topics. This paper follows the symmetrical method developed in STS and provides a framework for expanding medical sociology and mapping local studies. Based on the two similar symmetrical moves in medical sociology, this paper advances the third and fourth ones. It proposes to examine, firstly, the heterogeneity, multiple mediations, and the socio-medical regime in medical practices, and, secondly, the fact that local medical sociology is biomedicalized and it does not recognize the prevalence of Chinese medicine in Taiwan. Thus this paper applies the perspective of empirical ontology to such local medical context and proposes the problematic of ＂we have never been completely biomedicalized.＂ It is argued that the symmetrical method and STS perspectives are useful in elaborating much more open knowledge spaces for medical sociologists while attending to the changing realities of health, illness and medicine.