La división entre el conocimiento medicinal local y la medicina occidental. Caso de estudio entre los Tsimane’ en la Amazonía Boliviana

Interest in Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) has grown in the last decades with the majority of research focusing on natural resources and managing complex systems. The relation between LEK and Western science (WS) has also been at the core of the debate on how merging multiple epistemologies can contribute to development. In this article I focus on local medicinal knowledge within a native Amazonian population, the Tsimane’. I assess whether Tsimane’ integrate conceptually and practically the plants and pharmaceutical treatments and analyze if practitioners of two medical systems show willingness to cooperate under the assumption that such cooperation can contribute to improve indigenous people’s health. I found that Tsimane’ do not include pharmaceutical treatments in their cultural domain of medicinal treatments however they combine ethnomedicine and biomedicine in the practical level, relying more on plants treatments as first cure. I also found that ethnomedicine and biomedicine practitioners expressed willingness to cooperate and promote synergy between both health systems. Although the current divide that exists between local practitioners and Western doctors and the mistrust between both health systems can taint cooperation. If those burdens are overcome, the cooperation between of different health systems in the area has the potential to create local institutions to improve public health, promote biocultural conservation, and help the population to have medical sovereignty.