Traditional healing and folk medicine in the framework of Global Bioethics.

Resumen

Under the anthropological co-evolutionary approach, culture-specific treatments are the expected follow up of two factors a) the population’s specific biological (genetic) traits as they have evolved through time and b) the population’s responses to the respective challenges of their natural and cultural environments. Various cultures used to accumulate through time practical knowledge and healing experiences which satisfied their needs, thus legating to their off springs functional packages of Folk Medicine applications. This rich humankind experience is traced nowadays in the variability of “alternative treatments”, still present in the contemporary high-tech societies. Their background, their effectiveness, their economic exploitation, as well as their value within the framework of Global Bioethics is discussed.