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Chapter 6 Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Politics of "Traditional" Indian Medicine for HIV/ AIDS CECILIA VAN HOLLEN Traditional medicine. Complementary medicine. Alternative medicine. Herbal medicine. Complementary alternative medicine. These phrases have been flashing on radar screens of international public health organizations , pharmaceutical companies, and market investors since the late twentieth century and are gaining even more attention in the early twenty-first century. In May 2002 the World Health Organization (WHO) launched its first strategic program to monitor the use of traditional medicine worldwide and to make national policy recommendations for the regulation of traditional medicine. The guidelines for this strategy have been published in a WHO report, entitled WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2002-2005 (2002.) The impetus for this strategy came from the acknowledgment that the majority of people in the "developing world" use some form of traditional medicine, as well as from the fact that there has been a rapid increase in the use of nonbiomedical types of medical treatment in richer countries. The increasing global interest in traditional medicine has occurred simultaneously with the emergence and spread of the global pandemic of HIV/ AIDS. Patients, medical practitioners, pharmaceutical companies , and individual producers of traditional medical remedies worldwide have been mining storehouses of traditional medical knowledge in search of treatments to cure HIV/ AIDS, or at least reduce the symptoms associated with this disease. One recent study reports that 78 percent of people living with HIV/ AIDS (PLWHA) in the United States use some form of "complementary alternative medicine" (CAM) (as opposed to 40 percent of the general population in the U.s. doing so) (WHO 2002a: 14). In India, too, traditional medicine is being given to PLWHA patients with varying claims attached. Treatments derived from Nationalism, rrransnationalism, and HIV/ AIDS 89 Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani, and homeopathic systems are being administered to HIV/ AIDS patients throughout the Indian subcontinent, sometimes raising waves of controversy.! India's systems of traditional Inedicine, particularly Ayurveda, have been powerful symbols of nationalist identity and of resistance to Westernization ever since the late colonial period, when the British began to push for the development and expansion of biomedical educational institutions, hospitals, and clinics, claiming that biomedicine was scientifically superior to Indian system.s of medicine. The colonial expansion of biomedicine lent morallegitinaacy to the colonizing process in India and elsewhere, but the assumptions of the superiority of biomedicine were questioned by Indian nationalists. In contemporary debates about the use of traditional Indian medicine , nationalist arguments are still audible. This is evident in statements by government officials and representatives of traditional medicine pharmaceutical companies who want India to get its fair share of the global market. It is also evident in statements made in defense of the use of traditional Indian medicine to treat HIV/ AIDS patients in India. However, as traditional Indian rnledicine is increasingly marketed globally and becomes a transnational phenomenon, nationalist claims to defend traditional medicine based on moral, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist grounds that are reminiscent of some nationalist discourses in the colonial era, are now ironically joined with claims to legitimacy based on the degree of penetration into the global market and the resulting high profits. This chapter examines the complex and uneven role that nationalist discourse now plays in the context of the transnational flow of traditional Indian n1.edicine, demonstrating that the social character of "traditional medicine" in India (and elsewhere) is being redefined in the twenty-first century.2 This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in India with my research assistant, Sharon Watson, in December 2002 andJanuary 2003.3 It also draws extensively from newspaper, magazine, and Internet articles; press releases; policy reports; a pilot documentary film; and journalistic and academic books and articles pertaining to the subject of the global trends in traditional medicine use, particularly for HIV/ AIDS, and particularly in India. "Traditional Medicine" and "Complementary Alternative Medicine" The WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy, 2002-2005 employs two primary terms: "Traditional Medicine" rTM) and "Complementary Alternative Medicine" (CAM). TM refers to a broad range of nonbiomedical sys- 90 Cecilia Van Hollen tems of medicine and medical therapies as they are used in countries where those practices originated and where biomedicine (allopathy) is one among several types of medical practice incorporated into the national health care system.4 CAM refers to nonbiomedical treatments used "in countries where the dominant health care system is based on allopathic medicine, or where TM has not been incorporated into the national health care system" (WHO 2002a: 1). In...

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