May 18, 2018 09:50 PM
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/alter...-arrogance
EXCEPT: . . . a commentary on regulation of Traditional and Chinese Medicine (TCM), published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). Its authors, Nadine Ijaz [...] and Heather Boon [...] both in Canada, argue that regulating TCM under a western “biomedical model” is not only wrong-headed, but extends the predatory nation-gobbling of European colonialism to the medical arena. The result, they contend, is that traditional health practices such as moxibustion (burning mugwort over acupuncture points), Ayurveda and Unani (medical systems tracing back to Indian and Hellenic cultures respectively) risk being absorbed by a dominant therapeutic culture that could, ultimately, wipe them out.
[...] “Indigenous knowledges can never be standardised,’’ write the authors, “due to their inherent internal diversity and living dynamic character.” But they also take issue with the very idea that the Western model could ever be an impartial arbiter.
“Biomedicine is widely and falsely universalised as ‘culturally neutral’.” they write. “Far from being an ‘unbiased’ system of healthcare, biomedicine is itself a cultural artefact, rooted in the European scientific revolution and the linear reductionism of Rene Descartes and his contemporaries.”
Descartes saw the workings of the body as something that could be explained, machine-like, by analysing its constituent bits and bobs. Likewise, modern healthcare often cops it for treating people as bags of symptoms, in contrast to the ethos of complementary therapy to treat the “person as a whole”. And it is precisely because of those cultural roots, the researchers say, that when biomedicine tries to bring traditional health knowledge under its regulatory umbrella, bad things happen.
One of those things has a longish name. “Paradigm assimilation,” write the authors, is a, “‘predatory’ strategy [that] ‘reinterprets’ a particular healthcare approach from an indigenous system, reframing the approach in biomedical terms.”
[...] In its Traditional Medicine Strategy, the WHO stresses the need “to protect the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and their health care heritage.” Ijaz and Boon make much of this, casting TCM regulation as an intellectual property claim over bodies of indigenous knowledge. The looming threat is one, no less, of “cultural misappropriation — in other words, the abuse of indigenous medical intellectual property”.
The authors call for wide-ranging discussions on how best to protect traditional knowledge and prevent “further misappropriation”, while conceding that “additional work will be needed to elaborate upon how these principles may be operationalised.”
What to make of it all?
At the very least, the commentary raises the gnarly issue of whether knowledge can ever be “relative”. Many people tolerate the idea that cultural values – a tribal predilection to get about naked, for example – are fine for that group, even if we might not be so keen. “Relativism” about values isn’t so hard to swallow. A lot of those folk would, however, get jittery at the idea that facts – knowledge itself – could be relative.
One wonders, then, if cultural imperialism might be something of a straw man in the argument of Ijaz and Boon.
Few dispute that traditional cultures should be protected and knowledge preserved. But that is a long way from saying that cultural longevity confers legitimacy on a health treatment. By turning the torch on colonialism are the authors sidestepping the awkward fact that the real threat to traditional medicine comes from science, a discipline that bridges the global North and South?
[...] One criterion of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approving medicines is that they been shown superior to placebo on two RCTs. It’s a standard that could ring the death knell on some TCM practices, should they be compelled to conform to it. Which, of course, plays to the authors’ point that the Western model threatens to extinguish many venerable and ancient therapies. Remember, though, that plenty of Western medicines fall at the very same hurdle....
MORE: https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/alter...-arrogance
EXCEPT: . . . a commentary on regulation of Traditional and Chinese Medicine (TCM), published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). Its authors, Nadine Ijaz [...] and Heather Boon [...] both in Canada, argue that regulating TCM under a western “biomedical model” is not only wrong-headed, but extends the predatory nation-gobbling of European colonialism to the medical arena. The result, they contend, is that traditional health practices such as moxibustion (burning mugwort over acupuncture points), Ayurveda and Unani (medical systems tracing back to Indian and Hellenic cultures respectively) risk being absorbed by a dominant therapeutic culture that could, ultimately, wipe them out.
[...] “Indigenous knowledges can never be standardised,’’ write the authors, “due to their inherent internal diversity and living dynamic character.” But they also take issue with the very idea that the Western model could ever be an impartial arbiter.
“Biomedicine is widely and falsely universalised as ‘culturally neutral’.” they write. “Far from being an ‘unbiased’ system of healthcare, biomedicine is itself a cultural artefact, rooted in the European scientific revolution and the linear reductionism of Rene Descartes and his contemporaries.”
Descartes saw the workings of the body as something that could be explained, machine-like, by analysing its constituent bits and bobs. Likewise, modern healthcare often cops it for treating people as bags of symptoms, in contrast to the ethos of complementary therapy to treat the “person as a whole”. And it is precisely because of those cultural roots, the researchers say, that when biomedicine tries to bring traditional health knowledge under its regulatory umbrella, bad things happen.
One of those things has a longish name. “Paradigm assimilation,” write the authors, is a, “‘predatory’ strategy [that] ‘reinterprets’ a particular healthcare approach from an indigenous system, reframing the approach in biomedical terms.”
[...] In its Traditional Medicine Strategy, the WHO stresses the need “to protect the intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and their health care heritage.” Ijaz and Boon make much of this, casting TCM regulation as an intellectual property claim over bodies of indigenous knowledge. The looming threat is one, no less, of “cultural misappropriation — in other words, the abuse of indigenous medical intellectual property”.
The authors call for wide-ranging discussions on how best to protect traditional knowledge and prevent “further misappropriation”, while conceding that “additional work will be needed to elaborate upon how these principles may be operationalised.”
What to make of it all?
At the very least, the commentary raises the gnarly issue of whether knowledge can ever be “relative”. Many people tolerate the idea that cultural values – a tribal predilection to get about naked, for example – are fine for that group, even if we might not be so keen. “Relativism” about values isn’t so hard to swallow. A lot of those folk would, however, get jittery at the idea that facts – knowledge itself – could be relative.
One wonders, then, if cultural imperialism might be something of a straw man in the argument of Ijaz and Boon.
Few dispute that traditional cultures should be protected and knowledge preserved. But that is a long way from saying that cultural longevity confers legitimacy on a health treatment. By turning the torch on colonialism are the authors sidestepping the awkward fact that the real threat to traditional medicine comes from science, a discipline that bridges the global North and South?
[...] One criterion of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approving medicines is that they been shown superior to placebo on two RCTs. It’s a standard that could ring the death knell on some TCM practices, should they be compelled to conform to it. Which, of course, plays to the authors’ point that the Western model threatens to extinguish many venerable and ancient therapies. Remember, though, that plenty of Western medicines fall at the very same hurdle....
MORE: https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/alter...-arrogance