History of Asian Medicine

Asian industrial medicines have witnessed a remarkable growth in both production and consumption over the past two decades À in most regions of Asia and increasingly, around the world. This changing landscape is closely linked to the forging of new markets, which in turn influence the medicines' design, manufacturing and production, marketing, and protection as intellectual property. In the process, traditional herbal formulations have been transformed À sometimes (re)invented À giving rise to a new generation of drugs marketed for new aims, involving new users, prescribers and providers. Nevertheless, researchers in anthropology, history and Asian studies have paid scant attention to the modulations of traditional herbal formulations and the dynamics surrounding their contemporary use. Although anthropologists have studied the changing sets of ideas and regimes of value that emerge in the biography of drugs from their production to their use (Whyte, , studies that follow this 'social life of medicines' approach have generally glossed over the making of medicines as material things (Pordi e, this issue). Drawing on social studies of science and technology, this special issue aims to fill this gap, showing how 'traditional' Asian medicines are made, how they are designed for use in specific segments of the (global) market, and how the efficacies of products are constructed. This volume originates from a panel at the Fifth International Conference on the Pharmaceutical Life Cycle held in Driebergen, the Netherlands, in September 2013, which gathered scholars working on China, Tibet, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and India. The contributions show in great detail how in making new 'traditional' products, manufacturers combine ingredients through processes of reformulation, purification and reverse pharmacology, creating new therapeutic indications tailored to new markets and drawing increasingly from the categories of biomedicine. The special issue takes as its point of departure a new configuration of Asian medicines that Pordi e and Gaudilli ere (2014) in a recent article named the 'reformulation regime'. This term describes contemporary manufacturing and production practices in industrializing Asian medicine as well as their central role in reshaping how traditional knowledge-based pharmaceutical innovations are regulated, appropriated and protected by law. The reformulated drugs, Pordi e and Gaudilli ere argue, constitute an alternative modernity that differs in key ways from the exclusive molecular paradigm that has

Traditional Medicine collectively referred to as complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) when commonly used outside their traditional context, alongside other medical systems, including Western biomedicine.The World Health Organization officially promoted traditional medicine in developing countries in 1978, there have been increasing interests among developing countries in integrating traditional medicine into a national health care system. Integrating traditional medicine into a modern health care system, moreover, can benefit industrialized nations as well. The contributions of Traditional and Modern Scientific Medicines to health care delivery have attracted a great deal attention in most communities worldwide. Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Kampo, traditional Korean medicine, and Unani have been practiced in some areas of the world and have blossomed into orderly-regulated systems of medicine. More than 80% of the world's population in over 170 of WHO's 194 Member States currently use some form of traditional medicine, such as herbal medicine, yoga, Ayurveda, acupuncture and acupressure, and indigenous therapies.To generate awareness about traditional medicine, since the 1980s, a number of publications on self-health care have been developed to inform people about the benefits and uses of traditional medicine. Some of the areas of focused research include studies on the development of anticancer drugs, cardiovascular diseases such as arteriosclerosis and angina pectoris, respiratory diseases such as bronchial asthma, obesity, diabetes and other metabolic disorders, and basic studies on acupuncture therapeutic mechanisms for various bone and joint and spinal disorders, and on different kinds of composition of the human body. To ensure the safety, standardization, efficacy and quality of traditional medicines, the practitioners must follow the same stringent standards and regulations for production and use of traditional medicines as are followed for allopathic medicines. This study aims to summarize the advancements made in understanding the efficacy, effectiveness of Traditional Medicine. Traditional and local knowledge systems need to be protected, preserved, and studied as different ways to approach modern healthcare, science, and technology at large. Significant challenges exist in integrating the differing perspectives. Traditional knowledge is derived from years of history and experience and is preserved through long, complex narrations lacking the traditionally rigorous scientific scrutiny required by modern medicine. Modern scientists are prone to quickly dismiss its merit, considering it to be irrelevant as a result. For many, traditional medicine is the first port of call, and practitioners of traditional medicine have played an important role in treating chronic illnesses. These traditional medicines and practices have been preserved, organized and modernized during the past several decades, and have been fully integrated into the national health-care delivery systems from the central to the most peripheral administrative levels.

This article describes an unprecedented survey of a wide swathe of American Buddhists of diverse racial, cultural, socioeconomic, and sectarian backgrounds about their attitudes toward health and healing. The final section describes a follow-up study investigating how a segment of the survey respondents benefited from their practice of Buddhism during the Covid-19 pandemic. The most important overall finding is that American Buddhists see their participation in a wide range of Buddhist activities as a source of mental, physical, emotional, and social wellbeing. In light of this result, I argue that Buddhism is playing a larger than appreciated role in shaping Americans' attitudes about health, and that the entire range of Buddhist approaches needs to be taken into account beyond simply meditation.

This ethnographl study about the healing practice of an elderly Northern Thai woman shows how Northern Thai culture is practiced in bone fracture treatment and how this medical knowledge is recreated by the healer in response to patient needs over the last three decades during the rapid socioeconomic and cultural change in Thailand. This paper also demonstrates the power of shared, internalized and unconsciously communicated familiar symbols in Northern Thai everyday practice. These taken-for-granted symbols are implicitly expressed through, the therapeutic environment, patient-healer conversations, Northern Thai dress, and culturally defined body language exhibited by healers. This form of bone healing appears to be extremely powerful when it is situated in a context in which, familiar and meaningful symbols are condensed and encapsulated, as in the healing practice of the eldery woman and surrounded by the powerful signs of Buddhism or spirit worship. The practice of healers and patients includes the experience and reproduction of the past and present Northern Thai social and supernatural world.

Compared to the rich body of literature on Chinese, Indian and Tibetan healthcare practices, there have been very few social scientific studies on Thai massage. To fill this lack of research, this article addresses how the efficacy of Thai massage is constructed in the urban settings of contemporary Thailand. The efficacy of Thai massage is firstly explored in the larger social context of the globalization of Thai massage and the standardization of Thai traditional medicine. In this context, discourse referring to Thai massage as a 'natural,'

The substitution of materia medica in Tibetan medicine was an important issue in the past, and still is today. This article will offer a brief survey of references found in Tibetan written sources, and discuss the only three Tibetan treatises that deal exclusively with the subject. It will explore the underlying modes of substitution, and provide insights into the criteria that are used to determine suitable substitutes. Ultimately it will be demonstrated that one can distinguish seven criteria—namely the taste, healing potential, type, substance, name, shape, and smell—that are used to determine an appropriate substitute for rare or expensive materia medica in the Tibetan medical tradition.

Asian Medicines: Encounters, Translations and Transformations
Asian medicines are engaged in complex global networks of actors: conservators who watch the changing supplies of wild plants in Asian mountains, medical botanists who study the substitution practices of collectors and marketers in Asia, policy makers who control or prevent the entry of drugs into European countries, corporations who seek to exploit drugs based on Asian medical knowledge, professional associations who seek to regulate Asian medical practice.  ICTAMs VII and VIII both took place in Asia (2009 in Bhutan, 2013 in Korea). The European location of ICTAM IX will allow us to take stock of the current state of Asian medicine and to examine the global flows of medical knowledge, practice and materials from a different but equally significant vantage point.
Traditional Asian medicines play a significant role in improving the wellbeing of people worldwide, both as a health care system in their own right, and as a resource for bio-discovery projects. Their applications will only grow, and to reach a full understanding of traditional Asian medicine, it is crucial to integrate professionals from many disciplines, including medical anthropologists, traditional medicine practitioners, clinical trial specialists, ethnobotanists, ethnopharmacologists, ethnopharmacognosists, ethnochemists, herbalists, businessmen, historians, economists, political scientists, conservationists, botanists, translators and more. ICTAM IX will bring together these professionals to share their experience, findings and knowledge, and work out appropriate strategies and networking to enhance research on traditional medicines.

This three-day long workshop at EASTmedicine, University of Westminster London (May 8-10, 2015), organised by Mona Schrempf, brought together international expert physicians and scholars of Tibetan medicine – medical anthropologists, historians, ethno-and medical botanists, pharmacologists – working with and/or on Tibetan medicine, and also experts in Chinese medicine as well as IT specialists. The aim was to discuss and contribute to how an interdisciplinary and multilingual digital knowledge base should look like that could be used in the future as an analytic tool for documenting and analysing Tibetan medical formulas for a variety of scholarly users, and physicians of Tibetan medicine alias Sowa Rigpa. The workshop was funded by the British Academy/Small Leverhulme Research Grant, the Sino-British Fellowship Trust and IASTAM.

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The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies is pleased to announce a call for papers for the spring/summer 2016 issue of Asia Pacific Perspectives. This special issue will focus on the history of medicine, healing and the body across Asian cultures from the 16 th century -present.