From Marginalization to Integration: Turkish Governments' Regulations on the CAM

Turkish government has recently adapted an active policy to integrate CAM into modern medical practices. Beginning in 2014 with the establishment of a directorate dedicated to CAM under the Ministry of Health, the government created new laws and regulations about CAM practices. While the first legal regulations date back to acupuncture in 1991, the Turkish state since 2014 actively supported conferences, education and training, as well as application of complementary and traditional medical practices in Türkiye. However, representatives of biomedicine, particularly the Turkish Medical Doctors Association, did not only harshly criticize these policies but also associated them with a conservative government. Yet, what the practioners and defenders of biomedicine ignores is the fact that the Turkish state follows WHO's CAM policies, and also its legal acknowledgment of CAM is not simply an acceptance of CAM. On the contrary, many of the bylaws and regulations reflect the modern state's drive to control, to regulate, to standardize alternative medical practices, and to integrate them into standards of biomedicine. In this regard, in this presentation, we will provide a brief outline of Türkiye's legal reforms concerning the CAM and discuss the content of these regulations to trace how the state on the one hand tries to integrate CAM into modern biomedical knowledge and institutionalization, on the other hand this "attempt to save CAM's marginalization" can be read as a way to modernize CAM, to render its distinct epistemiological and practical presumptions commensurable with those of biomedicine. The paper presentation is based on an analysis of written, legal documents shared on the Directorate of CAM as well as interviews conducted with high-level health bureaucrats and doctors that were involved in drafting CAM regulations and policies in Türkiye.