Contextualising the global health policy of integrated healthcare

The WHO policy of integration of traditional, complementary and alternative medicine practices and practitioners along a biomedical framework, will be historically contextualised to reveal the stakeholders and the agendas behind the evolution of this policy and how this policy became intertwined with the Declaration of Alma Ata, primary health care, and “Health for All”. This analysis, which makes up part of my doctoral research, will trace this policy from the standardisation of biomedicine in the United States in the early 20th Century via the Flexner Report, to the League of Nations Health Organization's work in China and Russia, to the development of Traditional Chinese Medicine under Mao Ze Dong's administration, and ending in the implementation of this policy in Cuba, China, and the Philippines. Traditional Chinese Medicine will serve as a model for this inquiry, demonstrating that healing systems are in constant flux, and are a function of cultural, socio-political, economic, historical, and environmental factors resulting in standardised, integrated, and newly invented healing “traditions”.