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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the different values assigned to biomedicine and Indigenous traditional health beliefs and practices. It focuses on the values underlying biomedicine that often remain invisible, and on traditional healing's invisibility as a valid health care modality.

Paper long abstract:

All medical systems, including biomedicine, should be understood as cultural systems that are built on particular worldviews and values. They can, however, not be considered as completely coherent and independent from the wider global context. They need to be researched in their historical and social context, including an evaluation of their relative power differences. Rather than conceptualising Australia's health care system as a pluralistic model, which has the connotation of all sub-systems being relatively equal to each other, it should be understood as a plural or dominative model (Baer, 2008), in which biomedicine is placed at the top of the system and folk healing systems, including Indigenous traditional healing, are found at the bottom.

Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Katherine (NT), this paper explores how the biomedical system and traditional Aboriginal health beliefs are valued by Indigenous women and public health professionals, and in government documents such as Closing the Gap and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2013-2023. It argues that the government and professionals are overlooking the cultural values underlying biomedicine and its expressions, such as the focus on "evidence-based" health care, while only valuing traditional healing as "culture" rather than as a legitimate form of health care. It shows how this different valuation manifests in Indigenous people's engagement with health professionals.

Finally, this paper will discuss the implications for researchers, public health professionals, and most importantly: for Indigenous health, of these different valuations of health care modalities.