Traditional Herbal Medicine in the Korean Community in Australia: A Strategy to Cope with Health Demands of Immigrant Life

Abstract

The strands of medical social science based on such social theories as postmodernism and poststructuralism have tended to mystify what really affects health care use patterns including the simultaneous use of biomedicine and traditional medicine. The small amount of research on the use of traditional medicine among recent immigrants in the West which has been conducted has often tended to be dominated largely by interpretivist perspectives, which neglect the underpinning political-economic aspects of health and health care. The data for this article come from interviews with three different groups of Korean men (17 illegal/amnesty, 14 skilled and nine business migrants), using open-ended questions. Analysing the processes of adjustment to a new country and the constant involvement in hard manual work and long work hours, the article explores how Korean men in Australia make use of all the available resources to stay healthy. They have fully utilized the ‘freely’ available biomedical services under government subsidized Medicare although illegal migrants restrained themselves from using it until the time of obtaining legal status. However, Koreans have also utilized Korean traditional herbal medicine and acupuncture and other informal remedies despite their high cost, bearing in mind that health is a ‘capacity to work’ under the current environment.