Individual Constitutions vs Universal Physiology: Iranian Responses to Allopathic Medicine

Allopathic medicine occupies a curious position in the medical anthropological literature. On the one hand partnered with big business and political interests it is vilified as an arm of hegemonic Western culture. In this class of scholarship allopathic medicine emerges as a monolithic system insensitive to local cultural contexts in which one physician can seemingly be substituted for another at any time and any place. On the other hand descriptions of the cultural roots of medicine and of the sociocultural basis of the doctor-patient relationship paint a picture of culture-boundedness which makes it difficult to imagine how such a system could be employed in the universalizing culture-abnegating transnationalist dispersal of Western culture described in the former literature. For if allopathic medicine is grounded in Western culture and the doctor-patient relationship is informed by sociocultural conditions then logically the practice of allopathic medicine in any one location must be different to a lesser or greater extent from that in another cultural context. I will address this hypothesis here by exploring how the contradiction between the universalizing tendencies of Western medicine and the cultural situatedness of medical practice is played out in a particular non-Western setting Iran. (excerpt)