Indigenous traditional medicine and biomedical care: Contradictory or complementary?

Venue: Ground floor auditorium, Peter Doherty Institute

Presenters: Professor Ana María Oyarce

Internationally, Indigenous peoples continue to maintain their traditional health systems while concurrently accessing biomedical care, and their right to do so is enshrined in international law, as well as in the national legislature of many countries. However, constructing health policy to uphold these rights in practice has proven to be difficult in countries as diverse as India, Chile and Australia. Fundamental differences exist between the frameworks: Indigenous conceptualisations of health tend to be holistic, encompassing an understanding of the community, nature and spirituality; biomedicine is individualistic, hierarchical and positivistic. Regulation of health care is normally a responsibility of the State, in place to protect citizens from misconduct. However, in the case of traditional Indigenous health agents, State regulation may serve as an extension of colonising practices, forcing Indigenous beliefs to be packaged to suit Western structures—or it may form part of the process of officially recognising and validating traditional Indigenous medicine—or both.

Medical pluralism is an embedded and enduring reality of Indigenous health worldwide, pointing to the need to understand the systems as complementary, rather than in contradictory. This lecture will consider the complexities of the ways Indigenous traditional and biomedical health systems interact with each other and the implications for public health policy.

Professor Ana María Oyarce is an anthropologist internationally recognised for her expertise in Indigenous health, and particularly known for her focus on cross-cultural concepts of health, the valorisation of Indigenous health knowledge and the articulation between traditional Indigenous models of health and biomedical care

from
https://events.unimelb.edu.au/events/7771-indigenous-traditional-medicine-and-biomedical-care-contradictory-or-complementary