What is medical pluralism?

Medical choices are complex and determined by social, political, historical and economic processes.

The concept of medical pluralism implies that in any one community, patients and their cares may resort to different kinds of therapies, even where these have mutually incompatibility explanations for the disorders.

Pluralism is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a theory or system that recognizes more than one ultimate principle, who monism as its opposite.

Although much of initial work that anthropologists conducted on medical pluralism occurred in African and Asian societies, it was noted that ‘even in the United States, the medicals system is composed of physicians, dentists, druggist, clinical psychologist, chiropractors, social workers, health food experts, masseurs, yoga teachers, sprit teachers, Chinese herbalists and so on.

Actually, medical pluralism could be observed in many Western societies not only before but also after scientific biomedicine emerged as the dominant form of medical care in the medical of the nineteenth century. What is medical pluralism?