What is ethnomedicine?

Ethnomedical beliefs and practices were the products of indigenous cultural developments outsides of ‘modern medicine’.

The term ethnomedicine originally included the professional medicines of other cultures, suggesting that these were more formalized folk medicines, with rare exception. It implies something other than biomedicine – something more ethnic, less scientific and more magical.

Ethno means race, people, or cultural group. Ethnomedicine is simply the study so the medical systems or healing practices of a cultural group, the cross-cultural comparison of such systems, and increasingly the study of the multiple use of different medical therapies.

According to George Foster (founding father of medical anthropology), all human communities have responded to the treat of disease by developing a medical system, ‘the pattern of social institutions and cultural traditional that evolves from deliberate behavior to enhance health’.

All medical systems share a set of basic components. Each system has a theory of disease causation that explains why pe0le become ill.
What is ethnomedicine?