Navigating Embodied Knowledge: Professional Adaptation and Medical Pluralism in Multiple Sclerosis

This article examines how individuals living with multiple sclerosis (MS) negotiate biomedical authority and embodied expertise while maintaining professional lives. Drawing on 21 biographical interviews conducted in France, I reveal how MS creates an epistemological crisis in which individuals must simultaneously navigate fragmented medical systems, produce sophisticated bodily knowledge, and reconstruct professional identities. I conceptualize professional adaptation not as technical problem-solving but as a cultural practice involving negotiations between competing knowledge systems: a form of structural demand imposed on individuals by institutional environments not designed for chronic, invisible, episodic disability. Four interrelated dimensions are identified: medical pluralism and institutional choreography, embodied expertise production, emotional labor management, and identity reconstruction through narrative negotiation. Findings challenge frameworks that position chronically ill individuals as passive subjects and reveal disability as a productive site where different ways of knowing the body intersect with institutional power. This research contributes to qualitative health research by making visible the work that individuals perform not despite the system, but because of its failures.