Traditional medicine in contemporary contexts : Protecting and respecting indigenous knowledge and medicine

The term “traditional medicine,” as identified by the World Health Organization, “is the sum total of knowledge, skills, and practices based on the theories, beliefs, and experiences Indigenous to different cultures, whether explicable or not, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement of treatment of physical and mental illness.”. [...] Of all the literature reviewed, only a handful of sources offered general descriptions of the characteristics of traditional medicine and rarely defined the term. [...] Concepts of Traditional Medicine – Policy According to Wade Davis (a renowned anthropologist and ethnobotantist who may shed some light on “contextualizing” both the use of ayahuasca and the vast gaps between western and Indigenous approaches to medicine): To understand the role of the shaman, and to know anything of his genius in using plants, one must be prepared to accept the possibility that w [...] Waldrum’s The Way of the Pipe: Aboriginal Spirituality and Symbolic Healing in Canadian Prisons (1997) states: The healer is central to the process of symbolic healing, and in this sense Aboriginal Elders are central to Aboriginal spirituality. [...] The Gathering Strength volume of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) states that Elders are: Keepers of tradition, guardians of culture, the wise people, the teachers.