The Ethics of Digitizing Traditional Medicine

Abstract

Traditional medical systems, such as Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, and Native American healing practices, reflect thousands of years of accumulated knowledge deeply intertwined with cultural identities and worldviews. In recent years, governments, companies and academics have shown great interest in recording and digitizing traditional medicine knowledge to make it more accessible through online databases and software applications (Patwardhan, 2014). However, this digitization of traditional medicinal knowledge raises several complex ethical concerns that merit extensive analysis and debate. When considering the ethics of digitizing traditional medicine, key issues include cultural appropriation, intellectual property rights and ownership, decontextualization and completeness of knowledge representation, appropriate levels of accessibility balanced with cultural sensitivity, and the need for proper consent. As initiatives emerge to encode traditional medicine systems into modern digital formats, great care must be taken to develop ethical policies, processes, and partnerships to avoid misuse and misappropriation of traditional knowledge.