Andy F wrote:
>> I don't think I understand the bit about establishment medicine
>
> stealing alternative remedies. Should establishment medicine ignore
> remedies that might work? Not even examine and test them? If you are
> talking about pharaceutical companies scooping up traditional
> knowledge of, say, turmeric, patenting it, and preventing the people
> who practiced and preserved the knowledge in the first place from
> using, well sure, that's manifestly unjust. But in that case you're
> talking about capitalistic medicine, not western medicine. Would you
> object to Cuban (or any other nominally or otherwise socialistic)
> researchers -- who I would guess are pretty mainstream in practice --
> devloping something from ayurveda and releasing it into the public
> domain? Would you consider this theft?
Is this willful misreading? ravi is talking about the fact that western medicine adopts traditional remedies which, once incorporated into western science, are held to demonstrate the superiority of western science NOT the wisdom and empirical work of the cultures that developed them.
This reminds me of going to visit the British Museum with my first husband, who was black. As we walked out of the museum, having viewed exhibit after exhibit of middle eastern and african art, he said "Now I get it. You come to our lands, steal everything you can get your hands on, put it in your museums and, in the end, declare us to be savages and you, the cultured ones."
JOanna
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