| In the United States, I assume it’s pills.
Oh, yes. Some places like injections and some like suppositories, which Americans really hate.
Moving outside the realm of biomedicine, casting our gaze more widely … in the last 20 years or so, we’ve all gotten used to hearing certain health professions, or certain procedures, referred to as mainstream or conventional or regular, while others are called alternative or complementary. How do these names, these identifiers, influence the way people think about these different methods?
I can’t speak for other people, but as for me, I dislike the dichotomy, which is a typical American way of thinking. It creates yes and no, black and white, up and down, and never anything in between. The idea that biomedicine is the standard and that everything else is ‘other’ or alternative, is a remarkably primitive idea. But, of course, it reflects the sociopolitical power of biomedicine in the U.S. For nearly a hundred years, biomedicine has been in the leadership position.
That hundred years is, I believe, coming to an end. But it’s still a very powerful system that is taken as the norm or standard or regular. Those words all imply that it’s real and normal and that everything else is ‘different.’ They used to say ‘unorthodox’ or ‘nonconventional.’ Those are really fairly insulting to practitioners who feel that they are not unorthodox at all, but that they are practicing a different orthodoxy. But the point I want to make here is that this grouping of everything that is not biomedicine into one category is ridiculous. Specific therapies such as garlic pills for high cholesterol should not be tossed into the same comparative category as an entire medical system such as Ayurveda or chiropractic.
There are healing arts that started out at the margins of mainstream health care and have moved, through various methods of professionalization, of research, of expansion of numbers of patients seen, to something more closely approximating a position in the mainstream. Is there a certain point at which a healing art stops being alternative or complementary and gets over the hump, so to speak, and enters the mainstream? How would we recognize when something like that had happened?
That’s a really interesting question. Most of the countries of the world peacefully accept that there are many different ways to practice medicine. Though recently, in the last 25 or 30 years, most of them have decided that so-called Western medicine, or biomedicine, is the most powerful.
Is that a synonym for ‘the best’?
I don’t know. For a lot of people who haven’t thought much about it, it is a synonym for ‘the best,’ instead of looking for what it does well. The point is that in countries where people have a lot of choices and it has been built into the system for what is, often, many centuries, they are very astute about knowing where to go for what. So if they have an infection or they need surgery, they go to the biomedical practitioner, assuming they can afford that practitioner. But if they have a spiritual or emotional issue, they would not go there. They would go to some other form of practice that they believed would help them. If they had a dietary issue, ditto. And if they were pregnant and needed some pregnancy help, ditto. They’d go somewhere else. And it would vary with the society, which is why I haven’t given a specific example.
So, in a sense, you would have a level playing field, or at least something more horizontal than vertical, as opposed to a hierarchy in which one approach is the best and we work our way down from there.
Yes. In the U.S., biomedicine was anointed ‘the best’ in the early 20th century, in part through the money of Rockefeller. He also anointed certain medical schools the best, the ones that were formulating themselves on a German model. The Germans had decided that the model of disease involving germs or infectious organisms was extremely explanatory. Earlier, in the 19th century, people didn’t know about infectious organisms. Then, starting with Pasteur in France and then Koch and some others in Germany, it proved to be a wonderfully explanatory model, for a while.
In that era, the diseases that were most feared were, for the most part, infectious diseases which responded well to treatment within that model. |
