BIO 142 - Biochemistry of Traditional Medicine

This course explores the concepts of health, wellness, disease, and medicine across cultures and considers how these practices are integrated with Western medicine. We will focus on two types of interventions to promote wellness or treat disease. First, we will explore mind and body interventions including faith and spirituality, mindful movement such yoga and dancing, and physical interventions such as acupuncture and chiropractic manipulation. During the second half of the course we will focus on traditional medicinal plants and related modern medicines derived from natural sources. Each intervention will be discussed in terms of the relevance to the culture that developed that intervention as well as scientific investigations that have been conducted to understand the impact of this intervention. We will consider how historical injustices in Western medicine have affected communities’ willingness to have their medicine adopted by Western practitioners and how assumptions about traditional medicine and wellness have contributed to these practices being shunned in Western medicine.

We will examine how scientific investigations are used to determine the effectiveness of a treatment and how this process is not always compatible with various forms of medicine and ways of knowing. We will discuss how experiments are designed and how data is collected and analyzed. At the end of the course we will integrate this knowledge to analyze the role of traditional medicine in health care today and discuss how it can be used to promote community and just medical treatment. There are no prerequisites but familiarity with science concepts from high school chemistry and biology is highly suggested.

Satisfies a requirement for Health and Human Values
Satisfies the Cultural Diversity requirement