Traditional Medicine and Cultural Diversity

Unmasking our charade of diversity

Our current social environment aspires to an ideal of diversity-often a banal and irrelevant mixture of ethnicity, gender and sexual preferences-while forcing, enforcing and reinforcing a singular myopic worldview, that of technological monoculture.

Medicine is an expression of worldview. Traditional medicines are the hygienic, ethical and spiritual guideposts of many different people, cultures, traditions and worldviews. If we do not encourage them to flourish, they may die. If that happens we will have lost untold treasures of genuine diversity, and we will be further from true diversity than we have ever been, no matter what our world looks like on the surface.

It is a complete hypocrisy to pretend that we are being inclusive of diversity while we patronize, trundle and disallow diverse worldviews to thrive or even exist.

Medical diversity is the essence of cultural diversity. If we want to authentically acknowledge and embrace diversity, we’ll want to learn how to discover and respect differing worldviews. This means, perhaps above all, acknowledging and respecting traditional medicine systems…