ABSTRACT
Concerned about the popularity of unlicensed herbal medicines that are potentially adulterated or of poor quality, EU regulations have tightened and adjusted to ensure herbal medicines adhere to quality, safety and efficacy standards, and identify potential risks through pharmacovigilance systems rooted in biomedical logics. However, one of the effects of increasing regulations is that it becomes more difficult for (genuine) traditional therapeutic practices to exist, and many practices and their products are pushed to the edge of il/legality. The scientific exigencies of the process of legitimation forces traditional medicines to undergo a translation process which ‘up-roots’ these therapeutic objects from their epistemological and social contexts. In this chapter, we explore these tensions, and the difficulties the law faces when disentangling ‘real’ from ‘fake’ therapeutic practices based on traditional herbal medicine, including the assumptions underpinning pharmacovigilance. We also argue that regulations continue to be entangled in persisting epistemological imbalances grounded in hierarchical positioning of science over traditional medicines, and the limited possibilities for various actors to contribute to shared definitions of what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate alternatives in medicine.
