Malaria Treatment & Prevention

Kileken summarizes this ongoing debate very well. Of course, underneath this argument is a culture clash.
The biomedical scientists and WHO want to take ethnomedicines and discover (and then regulate) their effective biochemical components. It is part of science to look for the "magic bullet" and understand the biochemical and physiological processes. This is the standard approach which some social theorists would call "hegemonic" (i.e it delegitimizes and pushes out other conceptual frameworks). An important historical function of international health organizations is the regulation of medicines (since the time of quinine) in a way that globalizes biomedical knowledge as determined by experts.
On the other hand, people interested in alternative medicines are ofetn labelled as "soft" or even crackpots. They are often only able to publish an marginal journals and are therefore preaching to the converted. The are (or are perceived to be) anti-biomedicine. Yet the market for "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is huge in rich countries like the US. Lynn Payer's classic little book "Medicine and Culture" compares the practices and theories of 3 european and american biomedicine -- students often find the variations completely amazing.
Traditional medicines were a controversial part of the Primary Health Care ...

Kileken summarizes this ongoing debate very well. Of course, underneath this argument is a culture clash.
The biomedical scientists and WHO want to take ethnomedicines and discover (and then regulate) their effective biochemical components. It is part of science to look for the "magic bullet" and understand the biochemical and physiological processes. This is the standard approach which some social theorists would call "hegemonic" (i.e it delegitimizes and pushes out other conceptual frameworks). An important historical function of international health organizations is the regulation of medicines (since the time of quinine) in a way that globalizes biomedical knowledge as determined by experts.
On the other hand, people interested in alternative medicines are ofetn labelled as "soft" or even crackpots. They are often only able to publish an marginal journals and are therefore preaching to the converted. The are (or are perceived to be) anti-biomedicine. Yet the market for "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is huge in rich countries like the US. Lynn Payer's classic little book "Medicine and Culture" compares the practices and theories of 3 european and american biomedicine -- students often find the variations completely amazing.
Traditional medicines were a controversial part of the Primary Health Care movement and there were heated debates in the WHA. Some saw this as a scam perpetrated by a small number of individuals from developing countries who were looking for WHO funds. Indeed, there is good evidence that quite a few traditional remedies are harmful (but that also can be said fo contemporary biomedical practice). As an anthropologist, one of the fascinating things about this debate is that both sides call the other immoral of "criminal" in their stance towards using Artemisia plants for home based management of malaria.
The work of Willcox that Kileken cites is really interesting for 3 reasons: a) the question of resistance is not clearly understood but perhaps the plant itself is a type of "combination therapy" and that resistance results from overuse of refined extracts; b) if the first goal of global malaria programs is to reduce child mortality and we know that treatment is often delayed because of cost -- then can local use of a herbal remedy save lives? c) many childhood fever episodes are not biomedically defined malaria (i.e. plasmodium infection).
Clearly the use of Artemisia species as a community-based treatment modality is not the answer to the problem. Multiple strategies must be used. However, I think it is unsafe to assume that utilization of ethnomedical remedies creates more damage than good.