Complementary medicine as a Health Social Movement: a biopolitical reading of its decolonisation struggle within biomedicine

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Epistemologies

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse traditional, complementary and integrative medicine (TCIM) as a health social movement (HSM) and to use this category to read some relevant and sociological aspects of the controversy between it and biomedicine from the perspective of the biopolitical legitimation of HSMs within the health policies of Western and Eastern countries. It is argued that an epistemic and scientific perspective is insufficient to explain the complexity of this struggle, which goes beyond the medical-scientific community and involves governments, consumers, economic interests, political ideologies and decolonisation efforts from the Global South. In order to reconstruct this controversy from a broader biopolitical HSMs perspective, TCIM will be considered through its historical development in Western and Eastern countries and its different characteristics and mobilisation strategies. Within this interpretive framework, the analysis examines Western biomedicine's attempts to co-opt the TCIM movement and its resistance to biopolitical control and integration in different contexts and periods. Finally, it examines the recent role of the World Health Organization, where a new global governance reorientation towards TCIM seeks to promote decolonising health policies and a geopolitical shift in Eastern countries against or beyond the Western evidence-based biomedical paradigm.

Author

• Barbara Sena, University of Bergamo