Abstract

This article analyses the development of the controversy between traditional, complementary and integrative medicine (TCIM) and biomedicine from the perspective of biopolitical legitimation within the health politics of Western and Eastern countries. It argues that an epistemic and scientific viewpoint is insufficient to explain the complexity of this struggle, which extends beyond the medical-scientific community to involve governments, consumers, economic interests, political ideologies and efforts toward decolonisation from the Global South. To reconstruct this controversy from a broader biopolitical perspective, TCIM is considered a health social movement with distinct characteristics and mobilisation strategies. Within this interpretive framework, the analysis explores the Western legitimation of the TCIM movement and its resistance to the biopolitical control of biomedicine. The paper focuses on various phases of the controversy and examines different Western and Eastern contexts, analysing attempts to integrate and co-opt TCIM by dominant Western biomedicine. Finally, it reviews the recent role of the World Health Organization, where a new global governance reorientation towards TCIM seeks to promote decolonisation and a geopolitical shift in Eastern countries against Western evidence-based biomedicine