Short abstract:

This paper focuses on the recent mobilization of TCIM movement to legitimize itself in the evidence-based medicine of the WHO global strategy. It will be analysed as a new political orientation of “epistemic justice” but also as a strategy to push for evidence-based medicine inside TCIM practices.

Long abstract:

Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine (TCIM) refers to a broad set of health care practices that can be part of a country’s own traditional medicine but are not fully integrated into the biomedical health-care system. These practises, despite being very different from each other, have a long history and they are the sum of epistemologies, beliefs, and experiences indigenous to different cultures and movements, used in the maintenance of health as well as in the prevention, diagnosis, improvement or treatment of physical and mental illness. The World Health Organisation has recently delineated a global strategy to regulate and strengthen their evidence-based quality assurance, safety and proper use (WHO, 2019).

This work intends to analyse the TCIM mobilization for its recognition in Western biomedical health contexts and in the political arena of the WHO. On one hand, this movement might be read as a new global political orientation to health, aimed at promoting forms of “democratization” of scientific knowledge (Jasanoff, 2021) and of “epistemic justice” (Widenhorn, 2013). Or, on the contrary, it might be considered a new Foucaldian professional and biopolitical strategy as a response to the erosion of medicine’s political, economic, and social authority (Fries, 2008; Brosnan, 2023) by pushing for evidence-based medicine inside TCIM practices too.

Through the analysis of the WHO documents, this study is going to highlight the characteristics of this scientific contention and its recent evolution and trends, with the aim to understand which factors are contributing to change the relationship between evidence-based medicine and TCIM.