Therapeutic Space as Knowledge Space: Decentralizing Biomedicine in Inpatient Hospice and Palliative Care Open Access
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Published:June 2025
Wen-Hua Kuo, 2025. "Therapeutic Space as Knowledge Space: Decentralizing Biomedicine in Inpatient Hospice and Palliative Care", Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency, Leandro Rodriguez Medina, Sandra Harding
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This chapter aims to achieve a better understanding of non-biomedical therapeutics as practiced in hospice care. Unlike Western countries where biomedicine predominates, in Taiwan, some East Asia–oriented healing traditions enjoy the same legal status as biomedicine. However, a dual health system also creates debates on the validity of these non-biomedical therapies. The case of hospice, in which Chinese medicine has not yet claimed any specialty, becomes the best site to see how knowledge is decentralized, mingling with constructive alternatives for revisioning good deaths. Based mainly on the fieldwork in a Taiwanese medical center’s hospice ward, this study offers evaluations on non-biomedical therapeutics as actually utilized in biomedical settings. It argues that a dichotomy between biomedicine and non-biomedical therapies is unrealistic and unnecessary: instead of a universal trajectory toward death in hospice, therapeutic spaces emerge in these wards upon the use of non-biomedical therapies.