The Politics of Therapeutic Evaluation in Asian Medicine

Laurent Pordié (1, 2)

1 IFP - Institut Français de Pondichéry
2 Cluster of Excellence 'Asia & Europe', Heidelberg

National and international health policies tend to equate the ‘‘medical'' space of traditional medicines to that of biomedicine. Asian medicines are screened with regard to rationality, legality, proofs of efficacy and safety and their clinical validation reflects a normative approach, the social repercussions and political issues of which are examined in this paper. Therapeutic evaluation is subject to socio-political interests, fully expressed in the market of therapeutic evaluation. This paper examines the contribution of the macro-policies of health to this market expansion and the three characteristic features of this market: the global emergence of ethnopharmacology, the Asian debates centred on intellectual property rights and local knowledge, and the production of clinically-validated commodities.

Mots clés: Therapeutic evaluation; global health policies; Asian medicine; ethnopharmacology; IPRs; economics of practice; (Pordie)

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Laurent Pordié. The Politics of Therapeutic Evaluation in Asian Medicine. Economic and political weekly, 2010, XLV (18), pp.57-64. ⟨halshs-00516407⟩