The network life of non-biomedical knowledge: mapping Vietnamese traditional medicine discourses on Facebook

Traditional medicine is hugely popular throughout Southeast Asia and other parts of the world. The development of the internet and online social networks in these contexts has enabled a significant proliferation of non-biomedical knowledge and practices via platforms such as Facebook. People use Facebook to advocate for nonbiomedical alternatives to unaffordable biomedicine, share family medical recipes, discuss medicinal properties of indigenous plants, buy and sell these plants, and even crowdsource disease diagnoses. This paper examines the network characteristics of, and discourses present within, three popular Vietnamese non-biomedical knowledge Facebook sites over a period of five years. These large-scale datasets are studied using social network analysis and generative statistical models for topic analysis (Latent Dirichlet allocation). Forty-nine unique topics were quantitatively identified and qualitatively interpreted. Among these topics, themes of religion and philanthropy, critical discussions of traditional medicine, and negotiations involving overseas Vietnamese were particularly notable. Although non-biomedical networks on Facebook are growing both in terms of scale and popularity, sub-network comment activities within these networks exhibit 'small world' characteristics. This suggests that social media seem to be replicating existing social dynamics that historically enable the maintenance of traditional forms of medical knowledge, rather than transforming them here.