Medicine(s) and science(s) in the globalised era: the case of western vs. Indian traditional medicine as represented on the web

While in the West the notion of medicine is strictly associated with the term and concept of ‘science’, Indian traditional medicine generally substitutes or integrates it with words like ‘practice’, ‘alternative’, ‘traditional’. This poster proposal intends to show how different cultural perspectives influence such linguistic choices and the respective underlying theories. It will also consider how this once clear-cut distinction is not valid any longer due to the economic and social changes brought forth by globalisation. This holds true especially for India, which has undergone a real revolution in several fields in the last ten years. In particular, it will focus on institutional healthcare websites and their communicative and linguistic strategies to reach out to users/potential patients. Here, digital technology now cohabits shoulder to shoulder with traditional medicine. Indeed, the former has contributed to exporting the latter to the rest of the world. But globalisation points in all directions: Indian healthcare websites now deal with typically Western issues such as the environmental impact of drug testing, while Western healthcare websites have started showing an interest in approaches like holism and vegetarianism. This multi-faceted relationship between science, health and the web will be studied through the analysis of selected Western and Indian websites, following a framework for English medical discourse analysis and genre studies that was developed at the Universities of Milan and Varese (Italy) (see Grego 2010; Vicentini-Grego 2009; Vicentini-Grego 2011; Vicentini et al. 2012).