Biomedicine, Ayurveda and indigenous medicine: Three medical discourses, one critical discourse analysis

This research examines and discusses three cultural medical discourses belonging to three different cultural contexts: India (Ayurveda), the United States (Biomedicine) and Colombia (Indigenous Medicine) with the purpose of establishing similarities, differences, and interactions among them. Specifically, looking for a link among language, social sciences and medicine, the research finds its basis in a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).Thus, from that perspective this inquiry uses, as its sample for the CDA, five parts of the text entitled, Health and Illness: A Cross-Cultural Encyclopedia. Specifically, the five subsections of that text over which the CDA was undertaken are: its back cover, Preface, and the corresponding three sections related to the three medical systems---Biomedicine, Ayurveda and Indigenous Medicine.;This study answers three main research questions related to how these discourses or medical systems are generally constructed and produced through their characteristics and basic dichotomies of health-illness and body-mind. Having as a ground the relationship between what the text said or left unsaid, various conclusions were made. Biomedicine, the Western branch, or scientific medicine, according to the text-sample is constructed as a "neutral" science based on a biological discourse and representing a completely de-socialized, de-politicized, de-culturalized, and de-economized social institution. The text-sample constructs Ayurveda as a system of beliefs having some trendy 'new age' techniques that offers healing to minor illnesses yet, at the same time, as a de-socialized, de-politicized, and de-economized institution Finally, in the case of Indigenous Medicine, the construction as a medical system does not manifest since the text-sample basically describes healers and shamans as practitioners of fragmentary beliefs in magic and rituals in their role more as individuals than as conveyers of a significant medical system.;The said and unsaid statements of that text-sample are contested from the perspective of the CDA which emphasizes the critical commitment to understand how people's lives are influenced by social institutions. Ultimately, the CDA is utilized to critique ethnocentric and dominant attitudes that are often considered "natural" and are taken for granted in the use of language in medical discourses pertaining to various cultures. Thus, in this perspective, in a genuine cultural democratization of knowledge and, therefore, medical systems, Ayurveda and Indigenous Medicine might be constructed more as bodies of knowledge recognized by their scientific characteristics, while embodying holism in a prescription for balance in the body, mind/soul/spirit, and in acquiescence with the environment and the cosmos. On the contrary, the "science" of Biomedicine---which assumes that there is no connection between body and mind and that the body is comparable to a machine and, thus, an exclusive issue of mechanical, material or physical processes---might nevertheless not be constructed as the only hegemonic scientific body of knowledge. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...