Ashworth Michael, Cloatre Emilie
Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK.
Int J Law Context. 2022 Dec;18(4):476-498. doi: 10.1017/S1744552322000143. Epub 2022 Apr 19.
This paper interrogates the depoliticising effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the World Health Organization (WHO)'s promotion of traditional medicine. Emerging at WHO in the late 1960s against a political backdrop of decolonisation and pan-Africanism, traditional medicine has continued to be promoted in subsequent decades, culminating in the latest global Traditional Medicine Strategy (2014 to 2023). Yet WHO's promotion and acceptance of traditional medicine have also become increasingly conditional upon its standardisation and regulation - something that appears fundamentally at odds with traditional medicine's heterogeneity. Drawing on insights from critical law and science and technology studies, we suggest that such a process at WHO has done more than simply disqualify the toxic and the dangerous. Rather, it has implicitly and explicitly marginalised and excluded those aspects of traditional medicine that deviate from scientific, biomedical ways of seeing, knowing and organising.
本文审视了世界卫生组织（WHO）推广传统医学核心处看似中立的监管举措所产生的去政治化效应。传统医学于20世纪60年代末在非殖民化和泛非主义的政治背景下在世卫组织崭露头角，在随后几十年里持续得到推广，最终形成了最新的全球传统医学战略（2014年至2023年）。然而，世卫组织对传统医学的推广和接纳也越来越取决于其标准化和监管——这似乎与传统医学的异质性从根本上相矛盾。借鉴批判法学以及科学技术研究的见解，我们认为，世卫组织的这一过程所做的不仅仅是淘汰有毒和危险的东西。相反，它已经或明或暗地边缘化并排除了传统医学中那些偏离科学的、生物医学的认知、理解和组织方式的方面。
