Indigenous pharmaceutical assistance and the scientific silence: a review of the literature

Abstract

Although the importance of Pharmaceutical Assistance, there is no global instrument that specifically justifies its necessity on the specificity of indigenous health. This article lists existing studies on pharmaceutical assistance in an indigenous context. It has a qualitative character, conducted through an integrative literature review. National and international databases were consulted for the scientific articles searching, using specific descriptions of the object of interest. Three thousand nine hundred fifteen articles were found in the databases searched, related to the object of interest, in this case, Indigenous Pharmaceutical Assistance. Many studies did not have any relation with the object of interest, and most of them aimed to understand, from the conventional biomedical perspective, the mechanisms of the therapeutic resources of the indigenous people in the world, as well as to investigate scientifically plant and animal materials used in the indigenous traditional medicine, by using known conventional methodologies. A range of studies has addressed specifically illnesses through case studies, in which the focus is the evolution of the disease or western therapy were applied to the indigenous subject, in a research form that tries to indicate different clinical responses to the treatment and the outcome of the pathology. Researches involving planning, implementation, development, and evaluation of Indigenous Pharmaceutical Assistance are crucial for the future development of global policies for these people.