The Efficacy of Traditional Medicine: Current Theoretical and Methodological Issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The efficacy of traditional medicine is an issue that continues to vex medical anthropology. This article critically examines how the efficacy of traditional medicine has been conceived, operationalized, and studied and argues that a consensus remains elusive. Efficacy must be seen as fluid and shifting, the product of a negotiated, but not necessarily shared, understanding by those involved in the sickness episode, including physicians/healers, patients, and members of the community. Medical anthropology needs to return to the field to gather more data on indigenous understandings of efficacy to counteract the biases inherent in the utilization of biomedical understandings and methods characteristic of much previous work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.147 | 0.169 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".