Local Knowlege / Savoirs Indigènes
Clinical Research and Intellectual Property Rights
Laurent Pordié
(Argument of the Saturday morning atelier)
Traditional medicine today occupies an incontrovertible place in health discourses and practices on a global scale. The desired integration of these practices, first in primary health care and then in the global health care system, was to some extent induced and subsequently accelerated by national and international instances. Governments, all types of associations and bi- or multilateral agencies are substantially involved in the transformation of health knowledge and practices by redefining the social and political fields in which the latter are expressed, and more generally, the very notion of “traditional medicine.”
Vernacular knowledge and practices pertaining to health are generally viewed as “local” solutions that are firmly anchored in the “community” and financially affordable. By combining ideally three recurrent elements in international development enterprises (locality, community and economy), traditional medicines have experienced a new form of legitimacy, initially conferred by actors and institutions that generally come from outside the concerned societies. Plant remedies, upon which numerous health practices are based, are said to constitute a potential response to a range of illnesses, in return however to a certain degree of normalization and scientific validation.
National and international health policies tend to equate the “medical” space of traditional medicines to that of biomedicine. This medicine dominates the world health landscape by virtue of its formidable therapeutic performances, its modalities of instruction and organization, its international diffusion and the scientific procedures through which it is validated. It constitutes the filter through which other health practices must pass to be legitimated in the context of health development. This is indeed what the World Health Organization endeavours to do, relayed by the vast majority of governments in economically developing countries, by screening indigenous medical practices with regard to rationality, legality, proofs of efficacy and safety.
The clinical validation of non-biomedical therapeutic practices reflects an eminently normative approach, the social repercussions of which are to be explored. One should first examine the contribution of the macro-politics of health to the expansion of the market of therapeutic evaluation. Four facets of this market should be considered:
• the emergence of ethnopharmacology;
• the actual practice of clinical research as it concerns local therapeutic knowledge;
• the social use of clinical evaluation;
• the current debates on intellectual property rights and indigenous knowledge.
Laurent Pordié
Head, Department of Social Sciences
French Institute of Pondicherry
11, St. Louis Street
Pondicherry 605001, India
‘Societies and Medicines in South Asia’ Programme webpage:
http://www.ifpindia.org/Societies-and-Medicines-in-South-Asia.html
Selected additions to our digital library
Clinical Research
adams_alternative_medicine_research.pdf — Vincanne Adams, Randomized Controlled Crime: Postcolonial Sciences in Alternative Medicine Research, Social Studies of Science, Volume 32, Nos. 5—6, October-December 2002, pp. 659-690.
adams_et_al_challenge.pdf — Adams, V.; Miller, S.; Craig, S.; Nyima; Sonam; Droyoung; Lhakpen; Varner, M., The Challenge of Cross-Cultural Clinical Trials Research: Case Report from the Tibetan Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 19, Issue 3, 2005, pp. 267-289.
adams_et_al_informed_consent.pdf — Adams, V.; Miller, S.; Craig, S.; Sonam; Nyima; Droyoung; Le, P. V.; Varner, M., Informed Consent in Cross-cultural Perspective: Clinical Research in the Tibetan Autonomous Region, PRC, Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, Vol. 31, No. 4, pp. 445-472.
lambert_evidence-based_medicine.pdf — Helen Lambert, Accounting for EBM: Notions of evidence in medicine, Social Science and Medicine, Vol. 62, 2006, pp. 2633-2645.
petryna_globalizing_clinical_trials.pdf — Adriana Petryna, Ethical variability: Drug development and globalizing clinical trials, American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 2, May 2005, pp. 183-197.
petryna_clinical_trials_offshored.pdf — Adriana Petryna, Clinical Trials Offshored: On Private Sector Science and Public Health, BioSocieties, 2007, 2, pp. 21-40.
sankar_consent.pdf — Pamela Sankar, Communication and Miscommunication in Informed Consent to Research, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Volume 18, Issue 4, 2004, pp. 429-446.
Intellectual Property Rights
dutfield_TRIPS_knowledge.pdf — Graham Dutfield, TRIPS-Related Aspects of Traditional Knowledge, Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Volume 33, 2001, pp. 239-281.
fish_transnational_yoga.pdf — Allison Fish, The Commodification and Exchange of Knowledge in the Case of Transnational Commercial Yoga, International Journal of Cultural Property, Vol. 13, 2006, pp. 189-206.
janes_buddhism_market.pdf — Craig R. Janes, Buddhism; science, and market: the globalisation of Tibetan medicine, Anthropology & Medicine, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2002, pp. 267-289.
mueller_india_patent.pdf — Janice M. Mueller, The Tiger Awakens: The Tumultuous Transformation of India's Patent System and the Rise of Indian Pharmaceutical Innovation, University of Pittsburgh Law Review, Vol. 68, 2007, pp. 491-641.
pordie_hijacking.pdf — Laurent Pordié, Hijacking intellectual property rights: identities and social power in the Indian Himalayas, in Laurent Pordié (ed.), Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World. Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice, London, Routledge, 2008, pp. 132-159.
pordie_neotraditionalism.pdf — Laurent Pordié, Tibetan medicine today: neo-traditionalism as an analytical lens and a political tool, in Laurent Pordié (ed.), Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World. Global Politics of Medical Knowledge and Practice, London, Routledge, 2008, pp. 3-32.
On this newly published book, see Announcement below.
timmermans_intellectual_property.pdf — Karin Timmermans, Intellectual property rights and traditional medicine: policy dilemmas at the interface, Social Science and Medicine, Volume 57, 2003, pp. 745—756.
