Relationships between Folk and Other
Medicines Academic and folk medicine have always been in a symbiotic, although
often hostile, relationship. Information and practices have coexisted and flowed both ways. Plants found in a Paleolithic burial in Turkey have been identified as modern folk herbal
medicines, some of which in refined form have found their way into academic medicine. On the other hand, nonoral administration of therapeutics developed in academic medicine have become part of folk practice in Mexico and Southeast Asia. In an increasingly literate and pluralistic population, lines between "folk" and "academic" become blurred. Midwifery, for example, held an ambiguous status until the late 18th and early 19th century, when its functions were taken over by academic medicine and its practitioners were relegated to "folk" and semilegal status (see midwife).
Not without conflict, this trend is now slowly being reversed. Practices and practitioners classified as "folk" are now becoming professionalized and standardized. The holistic health movement in the United States represents a trend to standardization as well as a pluralization of elements of different folk systems, marginal academic systems, and
establishment medicine. It also represents attempts by consumers to open up access to medical care. Another example is the network of people with AIDS, with their families and friends, who search for ways to treat the disease in both academic and folk-medicine terms while at the same time trying to keep control of access to medical care in the hands of the patients. In all such cases, the success of the endeavor is related to the amount of social, economic, and legal power that the "folk" group has.
Much of the pharmacopoeia of academic medicineÑincluding aspirin (from willows)Ñhas been derived from folk remedies, even as academic medicine has disparaged the folk reasons for their use. In the past this process has mostly been haphazard, but since World War II there has been an intensified, systematic investigation of tribal and folk medicines in the search for new therapeutics. This raises serious questions of ownership of cultural property.
Comparison and evaluation of folk and academic medical systems and practices is a complex enterprise. On the one hand, indiscriminate interpretation of folk models by consumer groups may result in inappropriate rejection of proved establishment methodsÑfor example, the immunization of infants. On the other hand, the nonbeneficent or dangerous aspects of folk medicine have often been emphasized, usually without recognizing the contributions of folk to academic medicine and the similarities between them.