Gender, science, and indigenous medicine: planning research on asian women professional providers.

Women's health care prospects around the world depend on many factors, including broad social changes involving how gender dimensions within traditional medicine are transformed by global biomedicine. I propose a model that will help us to evaluate international health care transformation in Asia through understanding the specific impact of biomedicine on women practitioners of indigenous medicine. I suggest in the model that the relationship among gender, indigenous medico-science, and biomedicine is shaped by culture-specific and historical gender organization, the gendered knowledge foundations of indigenous medicine, and modernizing biomedical and Western science influences.