In this episode of Medicine and the Healing Arts, hosts Profs. Michael Stanley-Baker and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim reflect on their visit to Delhi, India, where they took part in the Second WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine.
The summit brought together practitioners, scholars, policy makers, ministers of health, healers and delegates from around the world to consider the place of traditional medicine in contemporary health systems. For Michael and Ronit, it was an opportunity to see many of the questions at the heart of this podcast playing out on a global stage: can mainstream biomedicine and traditional medical systems work together? What happens when different ways of knowing and treating the body meet? And can history help us think more clearly about the future of medicine?
Together, they discuss the atmosphere of the summit, the diversity of people and practices represented there, and the challenge of thinking across different medical traditions without reducing them to a single model of evidence or efficacy. They reflect on examples from India, China, Iraq, Brazil, Canada, Mongolia and beyond, asking what it might mean to become not only medically bilingual, but medically polyglot.
The conversation also explores the role of history in understanding medicine today. Michael and Ronit consider how the movement of medical knowledge across regions, traditions and time periods can help us rethink the relationship between traditional medicine, biomedicine, policy, intellectual property, data, and lived experience.
At the heart of the episode is a question that runs throughout the series: how can different cultures, histories and knowledge systems help us imagine more open, ethical and plural ways of thinking about health, healing and human flourishing?
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Links and resources:
Second WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine - full summit recordings:
https://tm-summit.org/2025/
WHO Traditional Medicine Global Library - a global resource including multimedia documentation, peer-reviewed articles, policy papers and more: https://tmgl.org
First WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine: https://tm-summit.org/2023/
WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre, Gujarat: https://www.who.int/teams/who-global-traditional-medicine-centre/overview
International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine(IASTAM): https://iastam.org/
WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240113176
Medicine and the Healing Arts pillar, MIT Comparative Global Humanities: https://comparativeglobalhumanities.mit.edu/pillars/healing-arts-and-human-well-being/
MIT Comparative Global Humanities: https://comparativeglobalhumanities.mit.edu/
