Inhabiting the Grey Zone: How patients sustain epistemically contested care practices

Epistemically contested care practices are often sustained in ordinary lives without being fully proven, institutionally endorsed, or stabilized by conviction. This article examines how such practices remain workable over time within plural care trajectories where biomedical care often remains central. Drawing on qualitative life-history interviews with practitioners and users of lithotherapy and magnetism in contemporary France, we introduce habitability to name what allows a contested care arrangement to be inhabited rather than believed in, returned to rather than proven, and sustained rather than secured. Through abductive analysis, we identify six forms of sustaining work — material, economic, narrative, epistemic, affective, and relational — through which participants keep contested care available over time. These forms redistribute evaluative responsibility across patients, practitioners, objects, routines, vocabularies, and relations, generating both endurance and ambivalence. By distinguishing habitability from normalization and tinkering, the article reframes the maintenance of contested practices as a moral condition of continuation, in which legitimacy is not received from institutions but produced through the ordinary work of keeping return possible.