Two commentaries in latest issue of JACM (The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine), raise questions about whether the value to health care of traditional, complementary, and integrative practices and practitioners is unfairly de-valued by the conventional medical establishment.
In ‘‘Statutory Regulation of Traditional Medicine Practitioners and Practices: The Need for Distinct Policy Making Guidelines,’’ internationally respected whole systems researcher Heather Boon, PhD, Dean of the University of Toronto School Leslie Dan School of Pharmacy, and Nadine Ijaz, PhD urge a re-examination of what they consider ‘‘colonial’’ models in regulation of traditional medicine practitioners. ‘‘Biomedicine’s globalized dominance,’’ the co-authors write, ‘‘is far less the result of biomedical science’s evidenced efficacy than it is a feature of the ongoing sociopolitical subordination of precolonial indigenous knowledge systems and related healthcare practices.’’ In present context, they argue that “‘biomedicine is widely and falsely universalized as ‘culturally neutral’’’ — to the detriment of even-handed evaluation of traditional medicine practices.
Commenting on the largely unacknowledged debt owed by modern pharmaceuticals to traditional medicine (around a quarter of all modern medicines are derived from natural products), Boon writes: “ … most traditional herbal medicines have undergone considerable recomposition en route to contemporary pharmaceutical usage, in a process that privileges biomedical epistemology while erasing/negating the remedies’ indigenous cultural origins and epistemic underpinnings.”
In an accompanying editorial, ”Colonialism, Health Justice, and (Re)Examination of the Value of Traditional Practitioners and Licensed Integrative Health Professionals”, JACM Editor-in-Chief John Weeks, suggests that the Boon-Ijaz theme is timely: “Harmful limits of biomedicine’s reductive predilections are increasingly under attack amidst the moves from volume to value, patient-centrism, multi-modality treatment, team-based care, use of non-pharmacological approaches, and individual and group coaching of people into life-changing healthy behaviours.”