Multiple Medical Realities: Patients and Healers in Biomedical, Alternative and Traditional Medicine ; Spiritual Transformation and Healing: Anthropological, Theological, Neuroscientific, and Clinical Perspectives (original) (raw)
Related papers
CULTURE AND MEDICINE: HEALERS AND HEALING PRACTICES
Course Description: Every culture and society has had to deal with illness and thus has well-developed concepts about the healing process, healers, diagnosis, medical treatment, medical knowledge and healing practices. This course offers a cross cultural exploration of medical systems, healers and healing approaches. In Healers and Healing Practices we examine differences and similarities in the ways that people approach illness and healing by relying heavily on an abundance of examples from various cultures, including that of the United States. We examine illness causation and classification theories, diagnostic practices, therapeutic procedures, preventive care, the assumptions that underlie medical concepts and practices, and medicine's relationship to the social, cultural, and technological environments in which it is constructed and practiced. The course focuses on the role of the healer in the context of culture and will examine physicians, shamans, witch doctors, curanderos/as, midwives, wise men and women, and other healers. The course also explores the use of medicinal herbs, music, healing aids, and pharmaceuticals in the healing process. Informed self-reflection and critical analysis of one's own worldview assumptions and medical beliefs system are fundamental to the course. Prerequisites: None Course Objectives: • Distinguish between different illness etiologies • Understand the role of the healer in distinct medical systems • Know the fundamentals of the Great Medical Traditions • Compare patient/provider relationships in varied medical systems • Learn that there are many ways of knowing and doing regarding health and illness • Engage in critical thinking regarding the relationship between health care and culture, environment, and economy • Appreciate the traditional relationship between medicine and religion • Employ the holistic perspective when attempting to understand human phenomena, including health care and medical treatment
Health, Illness, and Healing: An Overview in Medical Anthropology
American Journal of Ethnomedicine, 2022
It is a mentionable fact that, health, illness and healing are considered as a ubiquitous nexus in the holistic study of health system under the purview of Medical Anthropology. The socio-cultural dimension of health is viewed cross culturally in the study of ethno medicine in the present day. The ethnic communities as the mainstay of the unit of study in medical anthropology have to be observed with special emphasis on the ethno pharmacy along with some of the interdisciplinary domains. The present research article is an overview of the holistic aspects of health system and its different parameters in a nutshell.
Beyond the Limits: Medicine, Healing, and Medical Anthropology
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2023
This collection contemplates that which resides at the limits of the anthropology of health and medicine. By "limit," we mean that "outside which there is nothing to be found" and "inside of which everything is to be found" (de la Cadena 2015: 14, citing Ranajit Guha 2002: 7). Our work takes place within many kinds of limits: epistemological frameworks, ethical and moral commitments, disciplinary norms, ontological certainties, political economies, writing conventions, and the ends of life, to name a few. In this collection of essays and accompanying conversations, we consider how medicine and health are performed in ways that appear beyond such limits—as impossible, unreal, unscientific, irresponsible, unthinkable, nonacademic, non-replicable, fictitious, unethical, unruly, or untrue—but which, nonetheless, are. In so doing, this collection moves toward the speculative to examine the potential it holds for displacing our sedimented ways of thinking and producing knowledge in and about medicine, health, and healing. Our speculative orientation draws on and augments broader anthropological interventions that experiment with doing, thinking, and writing otherwise.
Examines the intersection of medical anthropology and anthropology of religion via analysis of three major ehtnographic monographs.
Medical anthropology beyond pluralism
Health care decisions in Sukuma-speaking rural communities in Tanzania reproduce a practical epistemology that could be described as radically empiricist, rather than just pluralist; their point of reference is the deeper 'relation' between events, which collective traditions articulate and subjects may experience, but which escapes the atomistic perception privileged by biomedicine. This analysis relies on a diverse portfolio of ethnographic data, including the use and structure of medicinal recipes, the choices of mental health care according to experienced 'effectiveness', and lay discussions on the correct aetiology and treatment of reproductive disorder. Combining two dimensions for a given medical epistemology, the (empirical/ habitual) basis of its transmission and the (open/closed) relation with other epistemologies, four types are proposed: monism, dualism, pluralism, and radical empiricism. The concept of peasant intellectuals, it is argued, needs to be rethought in contexts of medicinal initiation.
Anthropological Reflections on Medicalization
Journal of the European Institut for Multidisciplinary Studies on Human Rights & Science , 2019
We can study pain, chronic diseases and death from different angles to the biomedical model, to the perspectives and models of psychology, to palliative and terminal care, and even more, to the branch of medicine that scientifically studies pain and its treatment, algology. ES | Abstract: Podemos estudiar el dolor, las enfermedades crónicas y la muerte desde ángulos distintos al modelo biomédico, a las perspectivas y modelos de la psicología, a los cuidados paliativos y los cuidados terminales, y más aún, a la rama de la medicina que estudia de forma científica el dolor y su tratamiento, la algología.
Physicians of Western medicine: An introduction
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 1982
Anthropologists, including medical anthropologists, have directed their attention to the medical and other cultural systems beyond the frontiers of their own, principally Western societies. In their neglect, anthropologists may have followed an assumption of the neglected medicine itself, that it is scientific, and thus, they assume, beyond culture. The essays in this volume i explore a new frontier of medical anthropology: physicians of Western medicine. Such studies are of methodological and substantive significance in both medicine and anthropology. Medicine and its practitioners form a central institution of any society, reflecting and shaping its basic values of health and well-being, while employing and furthering its vital knowledge of human function. The essays here explore the theory and practice of Biomedicine, its cultural character, its cultural roots, and its cultural implications. They take Biomedicine as an ethnomedicine. While the medicine of our society is often regarded as monolithic,the essays here distinguish the very different disciplines which comprise our medicinethe many medicines. Not only is there a multiplicity of "specialties" within Biomedicine, but there are significant differences of ideology and practice which divide specialties and link them with others. Here we document the way in which these specialties and divisions defme their work, for example, 'physiological integrity', 'Christian psychiatry', and 'family medicine', thus shaping the beliefs and practices of the practitioner's world. Ethnography is inherently a comparative enterprise. Yet in our ethnographies of non-Western medicines, the standard of comparison has been a presumed ideal, a myth. We are concerned here to develop an ethnography of the clinical reality of Biomedicine, its divisions, its coherence, its incoherence. Biomedicine has been used also as a metric, a grid,-its nosological and sociological categories assumed universally applicable-'parasitic infection', 'depression', 'efficacy', 'the sick role', and even the distinction between 'patient' and 'healer'. Anthropological research has considered traditional 'psychiatrists' (Edgerton 1977) and even what might be called 'group therapy' (Crapanzano 1973), as well as ethno-obstetrics (McClain 1978), 'primitive surgery' (Ackerkneckt 1978), ethno-orthopedics (bone setters), and other indigenous healers. Some works have also given us accounts of the development and socialization of healers in traditional societies (e.g., Harvey 1979;.,Shchs 1947). Further exploration of our own medicine will elucidate its cultural,bases and provide firmer grounds for observation and comparison. If we are to understand disease and healing as universal rather than local phenomena, a fully
The subject of this article is the difficult relationship between biomedicine – with its therapeutic practices oriented toward the resolution of organic troubles of individual patients – and the profoundly semantic and social nature of the experience of illness in those who seek treatment by health institutions – mostly, but not exclusively – in non-Western contexts. Starting from a dramatic ethnographic example, the case of a Native Mexican teenager suffering from meningoencephalitis, admitted at a health center in San Mateo del Mar (Oaxaca, Mexico) and also, at the same time, ritually treated by several religious therapists for attacks against her alter-ego, I intend to show the different logics that inspire the diagnostic processes, healing practices and strategic choices of the agents involved, highlighting the difficulties of communication between them, the contrasting horizons of sense and value that orient them and the possibilities for negotiation and interaction.
Religion Medicine and Healing. An Anthology.pdf
2021
Religion, Medicine and Healing is an anthology that brings together a broad spectrum of non-‐Western healing traditions from the different kinds of shamanisms to the world religions demonstrating how each offers valuable alternatives and complements to biomedicine. Many local traditions are in danger of being forgotten, not transmitted, or even discredited by modern, orthodox biomedicine. At best, most local traditions have survived as fragmented pieces of once greater totalities. Everywhere, Western biomedicine has occupied spaces that were once the domains of local traditions and specialists. Based on the unique experience and knowledge of the contributing authors, Religion, Medicine and Healing goes beyond mere descriptive ethnography by engaging important theoretical discussions of ‘performance’, ‘aesthetics’, ‘personhood’, ‘soul’, and ‘life-‐forces’. Released in eBook format, Religion, Medicine and Healing :