LEGAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION ON TRADITIONAL MEDICINE AND PATIENT’S RIGHT TO PERSONAL LIBERTY

Abstract

This article aims to clarify the relations between the promotion of traditional medicines and the promotion of the self-determination of the patient. In its WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2014-2023, World Health Organization attempts to inscribe traditional medicine in legal right to self-determination of patients. Informed consent is understood as an expression of liberal tradition of personal liberty or human rights. Therefore, the right to informed consent in relation to medical treatment demands itself to be universal and cosmopolitan as well as the other principles based on human rights, which focus on individual, not community nor country in which the individual belongs. Regarding the traditional medicine, the WHO demands its member states to make their own national policies for regulating their traditional medicines and does not make an international standard to which every country would adapt their national policies on their traditional medicines. It is because the WHO considers that traditional medicine is a culture. Traditional medicine is firmly rooted in the culture of its country or community. It must not be excluded by existing medicine, which stems from European culture. Unlike informed consent, the promotion of traditional medicine focusses on the self-determination of the country or community, not the one of the patients. According to the WHO, the recognition of traditional medicines extends the medical options available to the patients and thus serves to better promote their self-determination: traditional medicine has different interest from that of existing health-care services. But can the quality of explanation provided by traditional medicine practitioners be comparable with that of the existing medicine? Does this explanation allow patients to freely make their own choice? Undoubtedly, the promotion of traditional medicines is ideologically opposed to the one of informed consent, because the philosophy of informed consent demands its universality. We can point out the tension between the patient’s right to self-determination, which is based on the liberalism, and the community self-determination, which is based on the cultural pluralism.