Towards a better criminological understanding of harmful alternative health practices: a provider typology

This chapter discusses the opportunity to differentiate providers of harmful non-science-based health practices into different criminological types 1 by drawing on a subset of case studies identified in the United Kingdom through media, judicial documents, and grey literature. We propose a multi-dimensional typology addressing motivations, individual characteristics, behavioural patterns, criminal trajectories, and organisational structures. The typology presented furthers our understanding of harmful health practitioners and could serve as a framework to filter the different experiences of similar dangerous practices in other countries, thus facilitating comparative research.