Acupuncture and Assembled Pharmaceuticals Abroad
‘Trans-national medical diversity' concerns a field of medical anthropology that has gained impetus from the worlding of the once scholarly medical traditions and other medico-religious treatments that thrive in the current era of neo-liberalism. The commercialised health markets that determine which aspects of these medicines are being transferred are often minimally regulated, but efforts to subsume Traditional Eastern Medicines (TEM) among the CAM (complementary and alternative medicines), and regulate them, have led to controversies of an epistemological kind. Debates between the biomedical establishment and CAM promoters centre on questions of efficacy and safety, health insurance and preventive health.
Research into ‘trans-national medical diversity' has highlighted the interplay of practitioners, patients and their paraphernalia. Sometimes, ideas travel in texts and seminars and in the medical practice of those who studied medicine abroad. Sometimes, patients travel into foreign countries, sometimes medical practitioners and pharmacists become migrants and, thereby, health care providers in cultural settings alien to them. Finally, material goods like needles and drugs travel. They are not ‘raw' materials, e.g. natural herbs, but culture-specific commodities, often strange cultural objects. Sometimes, precisely because medicines and practitioners are exotic and ‘other', they are considered potent and efficacious.
Collaborations have been ongoing, first, with Erling Høg, who was then at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen, in a project on Countervailing creativity: patient agency in the globalisation of Asian medicines (2002), then with Gunnar Stollberg at the Sociology Department, University of Bielefeld (see the Special Issues of the journal Medical Anthropology on "Globalizing Chinese Medicine" and of the journal East Asian Science and Technology Studies (EASTS) on "The Globalization of Chinese Medicine and Meditation Practices" in 2008/09. Recent research on the circulation, diffusion and interpretation of the - so-called traditional - East Asian medicines into Europe, the Americas and Africa has been presented at the CNRS-funded workshop in November 2010, organised by Rehseis (Recherches Epistemologiques et Historiques sur les Sciences Exactes et les Institutions Scientifiques) in Paris.
