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Accepted Paper:

What is evidence for? Commensurability and legitimation in India's plural health traditions  
Helen Lambert (University of Bristol)

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines meanings and forms of evidence and the search for legitimation in both international health policy and a local Indian medical tradition. It discusses ways to bridge problems of incommensurability between medical traditions in evaluating therapeutic effectiveness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper situates dominant contemporary understandings of how 'evidence' is understood in health policy and biomedical science in socio-historical context. It argues for a re-focusing of attention on the original impetus for introducing 'evidence-based' approaches to clinical practices, as a means to bridge fundamental problems of incommensurability between different medical traditions in regard to the evaluation of effectiveness. Drawing on secondary analysis of evidence-based medicine in Euro-America and ethnographic exploration of an 'experience-based' local therapeutic tradition in north India, the paper discusses differing forms and meanings of evidence, the search for legitimation and the role of practitioner expertise in judging therapeutic effectiveness. I propose a shift in focus from issues of methodological incompatibility to patient accountability and fairness of evaluation in both social science and biomedical construals of evidence.

Panel P31
Practices of proof in South Asia: the production, negotiation and use of evidence in medicine and healing
  Session 1