Abstract
Modern medical practice is identified as a relatively recent way of approaching human ill health in the wide scope of how people have addressed sickness throughout history and across a wide range of cultures. The ideological biases of medical or “allopathic” (disease as “other” or “outsider”) practice are identified and grafted onto other perspectives on how people not engaged in modern medicine have achieved healing and health. Alternative forms of healing and health open a consideration of ethnomedicine, many forms of which are unknown and, hence, untested by modern medical research. Ethnomedicine the world over and throughout human history has displayed unique spiritual (vitalism), pharmaceutical (herbs/drugs), and mechanical (manipulation/surgery) approaches to treating illness. The argument is that modern allopathic medicine would do well to consider such “world medicine” as having valuable alternative and complementary therapies, the use of which could enhance contemporary medical advice and practice.
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Notes
Craige et al. (1990).
Levin and Vanderpool (1991).
Ibid., p. 41.
Bregman and Thiermann (1995).
Grossinger (1995).
Micozzi (1996).
Grossinger, I, Origins, p. 227.
Ibid., p. 257.
Cassidy (1996).
Ibid., p. 19.
Ibid.
See Eliade (1964) for a definitive study of shamanism.
Harner (1982).
Eliade, p. 5.
Harner, p. 21.
Many forms of alternative and complementary therapies are being put to the text of scientific trials with a view to appealing to allopathic researchers and practitioners on familiar experimental grounds. This is especially the case when it comes to vitamin and mineral supplements, where manufacturers are engaged in research and development programs that are modelled on the experimental clinical trials used by large pharmaceutical companies to test the efficacy of drugs those companies seek to market. When this occurs, alternative and complementary therapies can be said to undergo “scientising.” By this they may not necessarily be abandoning the ideology of elementalism, but are certainly emphasising the scientific principles of allopathy. This may owe more to the necessities of living in a market economy than it may to the requirements for effective healing.
Hultkrantz (1968).
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 33–34.
Ibid., p. 35.
Ibid., pp. 35–36.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 42–43.
Grossinger (1995).
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 130–131.
Lord Herder, quoted in Schiötz and Cyriax (1975).
Grossinger, I, Origins, p. 145.
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Hutch, R.A. Health and Healing: Spiritual, Pharmaceutical, and Mechanical Medicine. J Relig Health 52, 955–965 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9545-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-011-9545-x