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this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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doomer
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Still really condescending to the person raising an important point about colonial attitudes. Indigenous medicine is more than just culturally important. If you define science as hypothesis, experiment, observation, and adjustment, then indigenous medicine is science. Holding the position that it has to be blessed by a scientific journal before it's considered science is colonialism.
This is true for all of the pomp and arrogance of Western science. A journal recently reported on the discovery of new fish and mammals in Alto Mayo. Were these unknown to science? Only if define science as Eurocentric institutions. The reality is that these animals were known to the people living in that region and likely have been known for thousands of years.
The arrogance of Western science is why we don't have midwives anymore, why women suffer and die from preventable illness while under hospital care at rates higher than men, why non-white people suffer and die from preventable illness while under hospital care at rates higher than white people. And it's not like Western science doesn't know that these outcomes are true, they just don't care enough and they don't have the cultural mechanisms required to address these objectively real problems.
Stop comparing white reactionary quackery with indigenous science as means of denigrating white reactionary quackery. The reason white science doesn't acknowledge indigenous science has nothing to do with virtue and everything to do with violent domination.
I mean, this is just emotional reaction born of being called out for your obvious arrogance and condescension, so yes, you have engaged too much.
Science is a process. It is a socio-historic process of knowledge creation. It can be conducted by a single human being in isolation as much as it can be conducted by entire societies in dialog with other societies.
The process of gathering empirical evidence is precisely what indigenous people were doing for several thousand years before white people showed up and decided they were subhuman. Indigenous science produced many medicines and medical techniques that we use today. Because it's science.
The problem is not with the indigenous scientific process, the problem is with the socio-historic process of European colonization. Indigenous social processes, like science, are at a socio-historic disadvantage under colonial occupation, just like women's health and non-white health are at a socio-historic disadvantage - not because the scientific method has flaws but because the scientific method provides very little defense against the socio-historic process of science being corrupted by larger prevailing socio-historic processes.
That you think indigenous medicine is casting spells instead of what it actually is, like for extracting salicylic acid to use as a fever reducer, is evidence that you are subject to the same socio-historic process of colonization despite having gone through many years of education and forming a self-concept that denies even corruptability, let alone actually corruption of your thought process.
If you're gonna fight the white reactionaries, try not to carry water for them.
The example of the fish "discovery" was simply to show that knowledge based on empirical evidence is possible despite white European institutions not yet having that empirical evidence. The knowledge of that specific blob-headed fish was known, empirically, by humans, but it wasn't until specific institutions spent the time to gather evidence that it was considered "discovered". You think the people living with those fish did not know of the existence of those fish via empirical observation?
Do you realize how many false medical beliefs we hold in the Western world that we had centuries of empirical evidence against but because of other socio-historic processes we had to live with? The classification of the mesentery as a organ only happened recently despite half a dozen studies showing it was an organ over many many decades, primarily because the doctor who wrote that it wasn't an organ was a British knight. Did you know that the discovery that the lymph system has a brain connection was literally diagrammed out by Italian doctors but the Brits couldn't find it after a few tries and then they just insulted the Italian doctors as being too eager only to find out decades later they were wrong?
Science is not just "show me bro" and anyone who studies the history of science should know that.