A prestigious Wellcome Trust Investigator Award of more than £675k has been awarded to Dr Emilie Cloatre for a project to explore the regulation of alternative medicines around the world.
The five-year project will offer a unique in-depth socio-legal exploration of the effects of regulation on traditional, alternative or complementary medicine in practice. It will explore different regulatory strategies that states employ across the globe with a particular focus on case studies in Europe (France/England), West Africa (Senegal/Ghana), and the West Indian Ocean (Reunion/Mauritius).
Dr Cloatre, Co-Director of Research and a Senior Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School, said:’I feel very privileged to have been awarded such a prestigious grant and I am really excited to take this project forward. The issues we will look at are highly relevant to contemporary conversations, debates and challenges that are unfolding as policy-makers across the world design or revise strategies to regulate both long-standing traditional practices, and newly emerging, or newly recaptured, alternative medical practices, in the light of persistent or recrudescent patient demand.’
With the help of two full-time postdoctoral researchers, Dr Cloatre aims to encourage a new way of thinking about the relationship between law and medicine. The team will examine the impact of contrasting regulatory frameworks on medical practices, broader public health strategies and access to healthcare. It is hoped the project will foster conversations across academia and generate innovative scholarly knowledge that will inform policy debates.
Research findings will be disseminated via journal articles, publications in professional reviews, regular project reports and a website. There will also be a book at the culmination of the project.
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health. They support bright minds in science, the humanities and the social sciences, as well as education, public engagement and the application of research to medicine.
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