Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the transformations of healthcare and health promotion in Russia over the past 30 years, areas of studying the medical realities of this period with a focus on the idea of integrating medical systems, practices and methods, and suggests areas for further research.

Paper long abstract:

Medical anthropology as a scientific branch in Russia was formed in the 2000s, even though research in the framework of medical ethnography and anthropology has been conducted before. Since the early 1990s scholars studied the processes occurring in healthcare (the destruction of the Soviet system). But the most important and interesting for researchers was the analysis of what happened in connection with the national revival - the activation of traditional medicine and magical-mystical practices (including shamanistic healing). In the early 1990s "folk healing" was formed as a special version of modernized folk medicine (approved by the Law on the Protection of Citizens' Health in 1993). Then the active process of building "integration medicine" and attempts to "integrate" biomedicine, folk healing began. A little later, traditional medicine of the East appeared in the Russian Federation (Chinese traditional medicine, Indian Ayurveda, etc.). Since the 2000s the activity of their interaction significantly increased. To date, we have a complex field of interaction between various folk medicines, traditional medicines, mainly in the form of traditional medical systems, and modern scientific medicine, presented differently in the field of healthcare and health promotion.

An interdisciplinary group of researchers (employees of various institutions, members of the Russian Association of Medical Anthropologists) has now finished a three-year research project entitled "Problems of Integration of Medical Systems, Practices and Methods in the Context of Medical Anthropology". The paper will report on the author's personal research and on the main findings within the framework of a collective project.