Between Reality and Rhetoric: The Epistemic Schism in the Recognition of Traditional Medicine in International Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is divided into five parts. The foregoing Part I, a brief introduction, highlights a few contemporary policy issues in the discourse about TM in international law and public health arenas. It identifies the epistemic schism between TM and the allopathic system as being at the root of the grandiose policy of integrating TM into national health systems. Premised on a multi-juridical framework, Part II examines select international legal and quasi-legal instruments, and probes the extent to which they make provisions for the protection of TM. Part III evaluates the international policy regime on TM, specifically as championed by the WHO, by examining the WHO's TM program. Part IV evaluates state practices in the context of national cultures and amongst constituent peoples and belief systems as they relate to TM in an attempt to situate its worldwide status. Part V is a perspective on the paradigmatic divergence between TM and Western biomedicine as well as their underlying theories of illness which is central to the epistemic schism. The conclusion re-sketches the central theme of the article, affirming, I contend, that TM attracts adequate recognition in the international law and policy framework reviewed. However, for undermining the epistemic question posed, discussions and policies about TM have limited consequence for effective medical pluralism and consequently the optimization of humanity's ability to tackle the burden of illness. The continued undermining of TM by the allopathic episteme fosters the reductionist assimilation of TM. A realistic future for TM is one linked to addressing the epistemic question. That question needs to be the focus of the discussions about TM in the context of global public health policy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".