Talk:Key:medical system:western

Remove questionable words "west”, “traditional” and “developed”

This Eurocentric tag and its definition use “othering" which should not occur in OSM as a global project.

The term“the west”" is an undefined collection of geographical locations with no inherent meaning. On a globe there is no west, its only our 2D maps that make us think so (and even then it only refers to the north-west because Togo and Brazil don't seem to be included). And is Russia included, because it mainly practices the "western" medicine? Therefore please replace the the term "western" with what you actually mean.

The same is true for the term "traditional". The "western" medicine also has a tradition just as much as the "traditional" medicine is in many cases evidence based (yet, maybe not formally but that is also changing).

Thirdly the developed world is only developed when using the "modernization theory" frame, meaning concentrating on economic power only and neglecting ecological and social aspects.

Edit: I would like to link to the lively discussion in the community forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/problematic-key-medical-system-western/98119

--MomoMilkiway (talk) 08:03, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

Maybe call it "evidence-based", "science-based" or "scientific" medicine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_medicine --rhhs (talk) 08:57, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

The traditional systems such as the Chinese or Indian are based on thousands of years of careful observations and note-taking, so they are also evidence-based/scientific. --Fabi2 (talk) 13:50, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

“thousands of years of careful observations” is still not considered evidence-based/scientific. The scientific method only started to be commonly used in the 17th century, and randomised blinded controlled trials are even more recent. --rhhs (talk) 19:00, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

"Clinical observations” are still used in medical science today, even when their evidence quality is now only weak. --Fabi2 (talk) 03:45, 22 April 2023 (UTC)

@MomoMilkiway: I know that the wording could be better, but if you criticise it, you should be come up with a better solution, which most people easily understand! The description on the page just try to explain in some kind, what the tagging means. So it looks like as you are one of the wording revolutionaries, who would love to put a “*” in physicians, if it were possible. --Fabi2 (talk) 12:37, 18 April 2023 (UTC)

I have added a "questioned" banner with an alternative suggestion as proposed by the discussion here in the community forum: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/problematic-key-medical-system-western/98119 .

I agree that the lack of an alternative proposal weakens any critique, yet it does not prohibit it. My comment was meant to raise the issue and come up with a better solution together. I think the forum discussion linked above did a very good job here.

I would like to add a personal note: I think we should drink a beer together and talk in our mother tongue (German?) before judging each other. But you are right, I do think that language is a tool that displays current power relations and that language is not static but can change over time e.g. to fight or visualise power relations. So the derogatory term of "wording revolutionary" may be applied to me by those who object this idea. Again I would like to refer to the much bigger discussion in the forum that also partly supported this idea.--MomoMilkiway (talk) 10:23, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

As there is no alternative, as you even say by yourself, and the term “western medicine” has the most uses on your favourite search engine, compared to alternatives with are even worse, such as “allopathic medicine”, how can I be then a problem, as even Wikipedia use the “problematic” wording? Even is the specialty, such as healthcare:speciality=* or health:specialty:*=yes, a replacement for a key describing the medical system, however it is called! This is why I removed the part from the banner for now. There is no “power of wording” even when some folks e.g. from gender studies see it so. The former GDR is a proof of contradiction, as there was e.g. equal pay for women, even as nobody put punctation characters such as “*”, “_”, “:” or “.” into German words for a claimed representation of all genders. --Fabi2 (talk) 22:05, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

Your revert disrespects the community discussion linked above. The tag has a "proposed" status but never underwent the Proposal process which would help to further discuss, enhance or reject it. I highly suggest to enter it into the process. In the meantime it is only natural to raise issues and adapt the description on the fly.

Why are you brining up the topic of gender again? This is off-topic, especially as the language (English, German etc.) plays a vital role here! But as pointed out, this wiki is neither a good platform nor a good location to discuss this.--MomoMilkiway (talk) 12:23, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Agreed; information about issues that some tag has should never be blatantly removed. It could instead be clarified, information about non-problematic usages added, etc. In other words, goal should be to provide well-balanced pro and contra reasons why to use (or not) some tag; and let mappers themselves decide what tag is best to their use case. In short, one should provide extra information to clarify, not delete criticisms because one happens to disagree with them. --mnalis (talk) 14:34, 1 May 2024 (UTC)

The description has already improved and clarified. There was no critique removed, besides from that to use, the here not applying tag, healthcare:speciality=* as an "alternative" to medical_system:*=*. If you have ideas for further improvement, then we can discuss them here. healthcare:speciality=* is no alternative to medical_system:*=*, so don't re-add it as "alternative" with your next sock puppet user. --Fabi2 (talk) 16:45, 1 May 2024 (UTC)