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A university study has been slammed for suggesting the government should ‘decolonise’ Australia’s healthcare and add cultural medicines like song and dance. A research paper from Southern Cross University found 90 per cent of Indigenous people would like to access cultural medicine, but many have difficulty doing so.
It also highlighted that cultural medicines were largely absent from policy which guides medical practice. Research fellow Alana Gall (pictured), who led the study, said cultural medicine was often seen as not being ‘equally relevant’ in medical policy. Cultural medicines included topical, ingested or inhaled medicines derived from plants and animals, foods with medical properties, hands-on healing like massage, ceremony, dance and song, spiritual healing and Country as a healer.
Conservative commentator Prue MacSween (pictured) told Daily Mail Australia cultural medicine was ‘not equally relevant in any way’ to Western medicine, but admitted learning about it was ‘informative as part of an education’. ‘Learning about proven treatments used by other cultures can be useful, but what I find offensive about this, is the underlying intent by yet another woke university to attack and undermine our colonial history,’ she said. ‘They seek to continue the insidious indoctrination and “edu-grooming” of young people to create resentment and hate of our past. Universities have become dangerous places for young minds. They are churning out so-called “social justice” warriors who are peeved and angry about Western society and armed with a degree in indignancy and ignorance.’
Ms Gall said Australia should adopt ‘medical pluralism’ that involved ‘using both biomedicine, which is our standard type of healthcare in Australia, as well as cultural medicine’. ‘There was little to no guidance on what health professionals should do if their patients are either using or wanting to use cultural medicine,’ she said.
‘It shouldn’t be one at the exclusion of the other. I see it as decolonising healthcare, but we need to do things in the right order. We need cultural medicines to be integrated into mainstream healthcare, but we also need to put the work into defining, understanding and protecting the knowledge associated with them.’ Dr Gall said including cultural medicines in Medicare and on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme could also empower practitioners and patients.
Daily Mail Australia has contacted Health Minister Mark Butler and Shadow Minister for Health Anne Ruston for comment. The university is the latest to come under fire over its ‘wokeness’. Macquarie University students studying Age and the Law under course organiser Holly Doel-Mackaway spoke out in March after being asked to perform a heartfelt Welcome to Country and a ‘privilege walk’ to pass a law module.
In an exercise intended to teach law students about social and economic power, class participants were randomly assigned personalities ranging from ‘poor children with diseases to CEOs of large companies’, The Australian reported.
The students were asked to step forward when they felt a statement – for example, ‘I eat three meals a day’ – applied to their character. Those who were assigned ‘privileged positions’ managed to cross the classroom while the ‘oppressed people stayed behind’. ‘We were then made to feel bad for having these positions. The convener told those of us with jobs or positions of power that we had achieved our positions by “stepping on the shoulders of others”,’ the anonymous student said.
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