Join or be excluded from biomedicine? JOINS and Post-colonial Korea

Abstract

This paper discusses re-emergence of Korean medicine(s) in the global context with a focus on a natural drug JOINS, a highly contentious drug regarding its legal status. By following through its life world, the paper contends that the drug is the embodiment of the postcolonial anxiety that crosses the intersections between the aspiring nation and globalizing strategies of the bio-pharmaceutical industry. JOINS is a natural drug prescribed to alleviate the symptoms of degenerative arthritis. SK Chemicals, Ltd., a giant domestic pharmaceutical company developed the drug by utilizing the knowledge of traditional pharmacopeia and put it on the market in 2001. In the domestic market, the drug is treated as a prescription drug, implying that Western medicine-trained doctors (as opposed to Korean medicine doctors) are entitled to prescribe drugs. It also indicates that the drug has undergone a series of lab tests such as toxicity, efficacy, and clinical trials in compliance with regulatory guidelines. However, the domestic standards are not rigorous enough to satisfy international standards, so that it is exported as a nutritional supplement abroad. The government, the pharmaceutical industry, and the Western medicine profession are happy with how the drug stands domestically and internationally. Rather, it is Korean doctors who try to disrupt the status quo and reclaim their rights to traditional knowledge, who have been alienated from the pharmaceuticalization of traditional knowledge. Thus, the JOINS tablet embodies the complex web of modern Korean society, professional interests, the pharmaceutical industry, and globalization.

Keywords:

• reformulation
• herbal remedies
• natural drugs
• osteoarthritis
• post-colonial Korea

Acknowledgements

The author is greatly thankful to Laurent Pordié, Anita Harden, and all the participants of the conference on ‘The Pharmaceutical Life Cycle.’ A draft paper was read at the Fifth International Conference on the Pharmaceutical Life Cycle in 2013 with the support of PharmAsia Research Network & Center for Research on Medicine, Science, Health and Society, CERMES3, France and the Social Science Research Center at the University of Amsterdam. The author is also greatly thankful to the two anonymous referees of Anthropology and Medicine for their critical and helpful comments.

Ethics: This type of research does not require institutional ethical approval in South Korea.

Conflict of interest: none.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By the colonial period, this article refers to the Japanese colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, and thereby the postcolonial points to the periods starting from 1948 when the South Korean government was in formation.

2. Lately, the professional organization of traditional medicine has renamed it as ‘Korean medicine.’ Hereafter, official/professionalized traditional medicine is referred to as Korean medicine.

3. Throughout the paper, Oriental medicine(s) is/are interchangeably used with Korean medicine(s), as both notations are opportunistically and politically employed by Korean actors. When referring to the terminologies of Korean medicine(s), Korean phonetics is used. For instance, ‘Eum’ and ‘Yang’ are commonly known as ‘Ying’ and ‘Yang’ outside Korea. Edward Said (Said 1979) has critically observed the notion of Orientalism. The Orient is imagined and constructed to be different and inferior as compared to the West in the eyes of Euro-Americans. The term ‘Oriental’ in Korean medicine should not be seen as a sign of the internalization of Orientalism. Rather, Korean doctors’ adoption of Oriental can be seen as a pragmatic political choice to differentiate from and concurrently to be inclusive of neighboring countries such as China and Japan.

4. It can be argued that the interested professional groups took advantage of the Western policy trends as a legitimizing strategy. Around that time the governments of the United States and United Kingdom paid keen attention to the rise of alternative and complementary (CAM) therapies and began to investigate scientific grounds of CAM therapies.

5. Han yak je je is defined as an industrialized formulation of Korean medicines in accordance with the principles of Korean medicine diagnostics and therapeutics (Pharmacy Law 2: 6)

6. The government's drive to foster the bioindustry in the early 1990s was directly connected to the reutilization of traditional knowledge about herbal medicines and herbs. Many domestic pharmaceutical companies were involved in facilitating the commercialization of herbal medicines. Ironically, or rather naturally, many domestic pharmaceutical companies found business opportunities in commercializing traditional medicines into functional drinks. Since the mid-1990s, the market for functional drinks has dramatically expanded, as shown in the increased number of patents.

7. The chosen medicinal herbs have been well recognized and used by Korean medicine practitioners, which served as a reasonable cause to get phase I clinical trials exempted. The regulatory requirements for natural drugs to get approved are rather loose, mainly because medicinal plants listed in Korean medicines texts are believed to be safe because they have been used for thousands of years, in the equivalent of clinical trials, on the human body. However, there is a study to suggest that the safety and efficacy of SKI 306X is not entirely confirmed yet (De Silva 2011).

8. SKI 306X is exported to Australia and New Zealand under the trade name of ‘Carathron’ by Chalmers Dale & Co. Carathron is made out of two herbal species Scutellaria Baicalensis (Chinese skullcap) and Acacia Cathechu (Black cathechu), whose pharmacological actions are well documented in both traditional medical books and modern scientific publications. The company's website explains that both herbs have been used to relieve the pain of joint inflammation and associated symptoms in the Orient and in Ayuverdic medicine (available online: https://chalmersdale.com.au/store/cararthron/. Last accessed on July 31, 2014).

9. A new dietary ingredient refers to a dietary supplement that had not been sold before October 15, 1994 in the US.