Biomedicine is what we think of as “modern” medicine or “western” medicine. It is sanitation, vaccination, antibiotics, the type of medicine based on disease and microbiology. To call biomedine “modern” and “western” is a lie, as disease prevention is an ancient as aqueducts, and understanding of illness extends much beyond the western world (Bastien-x, Porter-2).
Ethnomedicine is what we think of as “traditional” or “regional” medicine. It is the medicine based on folk lore, herbology, experience, and understanding of a patient’s health as not just the mind’s relationship with the body, but the bodymind’s relationship with the universe. Ethnomedicine takes different forms in different places. It is a place and people specific ideology surrounding health (Bastien- x-xi)
There is an emphasis in contemporary academic circles on biomedicine over ethnomedine. Often, biomedicine is curative, that is it isn’t used until someone gets sick. It is therefore easy to prove that it works because if people recover or have a decrease in symptoms, it can be connected to the medicine through clinical trials. Ethnomedicine is often more preventative, which is harder to prove if something works. For example, if you take something and you don’t get sick, how do you know you weren’t going to get sick in the first place. In our society, biomedicine has thus been deemed more useful. Biomedicine also works with the capitalist systems of insurance and pharmaceuticals that much of the world has.
Let me know what you thing about ethnomedicine in the comments! Should we try integrating it and making our medical system all around more holistic?
Landscapes of Health 