Traditional medicines, law, and the (dis)ordering of temporalities

In this chapter, I explore the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine, in order to reflect on how particular temporalities shape, and are shaped by, the interface between law and medicine. This chapter makes two key points: first, it argues that both biomedicine and law have relied on a particular sense of ‘modernity’ as a linear temporal process; in turn, this has been key in developing both crude, and more subtle, social patterns of power, dominance, and exclusion that continue to impact on contemporary societies. Second, it argues that as law increasingly engages in the regulation of other types of medicine, it continues to emulate biomedical models and assumptions as to what ‘modern medicine’ should look like, including its temporal features.