AO: Osseo-Asare notes that benefit sharing as a model has over-emphasized local priority and has failed to acknowledge the widespread distribution of herbal knowledge. She argues that traditional medicine in African contexts may be more diffuse and less tied to regional environments than has often been assumed. Osseo-Asare questions the assumption that IK is local knowledge and argues that traditional medicine was shared across a wide range of communities and was relatively public. Taking a long view of plants in African history she suggests their wide circulation and adaptation within overlapping systems of belief and use and within linked ecological zones shows that similar recipes for the same plant across geographic areas point to more regional continuities than differences. (page 16). She proposes that biomedicine and African traditional healing have not only been complementary but were, in fact, adapted from one another (page 18).
