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Medical pluralism: Opportunities and barriers to good health
Book chapter

Medical pluralism: Opportunities and barriers to good health

Meredith G. Marten and Spencer K. Seymour
The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and Global Health, pp.198-210
Routledge, 1
2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003284345-17

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Abstract

Anthropologists have studied medical pluralism since the earliest, colonial days of the discipline, and the development of medical anthropology as a specific subfield itself was established through interests in the diversity of healing beliefs and practices observed across cultures. Traditional and complementary medicine has long been acknowledged by global health professionals as well (even though it is often not formally recognized nor adequately supported). Many of these types of care, particularly when provided alongside high-quality biomedicine when needed, offer the kinds of holistic engagement that biomedicine often excludes, particularly as nonbiomedical care often attends to the social aspects of health and well-being that are missing from biomedical practice. Given these 'realities', in this chapter we argue that high-quality biomedical care be made more accessible and available to improve the health and well-being of people around the world. We also hope to demonstrate how medical pluralism can often be valuable in improving patients' health, and, when appropriate, we encourage global health practitioners' support of plural forms of care around the world.

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