Health practices in Central Asia today reflect a history of tensions between Russianized biomedical concepts and local ethnomedical notions of illness and treatment.

Before the Russian conquest medical practitioners in Central Asia consisted of shamans, mullahs, and folk doctors, the first two spiritual or religious and the last empirical healers. The tradition of folk medicine was bolstered by the writings of such scholars as Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), and medical treatises and practices imported from India, Persia, and Ch…