Medical Pluralism In The Andes

Capturing the intricacies of health practice within the fascinating context of Andean social history, cultural tradition, community and folklore, this is a remarkable and intimate chronicle of Andean culture and everyday life.

In most places on the African continent, multiple health care options exist and patients draw on a therapeutic continuum that ranges from traditional medicine and religious healing to the latest in biomedical technology. The ethnographically based essays in this volume highlight African ways of perceiving sickness, making sense of and treating suffering, and thinking about health care to reveal the range and practice of everyday medicine in Africa through historical, political, and economic contexts.

This new book tells the story of Miguel Perdomo Niera, a healer whose amazing cures during his travels through the northern Andes in the 1860s and 1870s evoked both enormous hostility and widespread adulation. A combination of narrative and analysis, the book documents Perdomo's experiences in Colombia and Ecuador and offers valuable insights into the social history of medicine during the Great Transformation in nineteenth-century Latin America. Reactions to Perdomo also illuminate the conflicts between colonial and modern and between religious and secular belief systems in Latin America during this time. This era pitted the norms of colonial Latin America against forces of change that shaped contemporary Latin America. Perdomo's practice of medicine demonstrated a strong religious influence that liberals thought were incompatible with a modern, secular society. Seldom have the contentions surrounding competitive medical systems been so starkly illuminated as in the case of Perdomo. One of a group of empirics, also known as cranderos, bleeders or barbers, who offered health care to people in Latin America, Perdomo did not charge for his services. Many people were perplexed by his cures. The drugs that he used allegedly enabled him to perform minor surgery without pain, swelling, or excessive bleeding. Supporters wrote numerous testimonials expressing their gratitude for his ability to cure illnesses that had plagued them for years. But Perdomo also had his detractors. Physicians, formally trained medicos, and those who supported scientific modernization were critical of Perdomo's practice of Hispanic medicine, even though it was part of the medical system of the day. Blending Catholic healing beliefs with indigenous and African medical ideologies, Hispanic medicine challenged the innovations occurring in the professional medical community. This volume also makes a singular contribution to a scholarly understanding of the emergence of medical pluralism, tracking the submergence of traditional

In 1997, when Lucia Guerra-Reyes began research in Peru, she observed a profound disconnect between the birth care desires of health personnel and those of indigenous women. Midwives and doctors would plead with her as the anthropologist to "educate women about the dangerous inadequacy of their traditions." They failed to see how their aim of achieving low rates of maternal mortality clashed with the experiences of local women, who often feared public health centers, where they could experience discrimination and verbal or physical abuse. Mainly, the women and their families sought a "good" birth, which was normally a home birth that corresponded with Andean perceptions of health as a balance of bodily humors. Peru's Intercultural Birthing Policy of 2005 was intended to solve these longstanding issues by recognizing indigenous cultural values and making biomedical care more accessible and desirable for indigenous women. Yet many difficulties remain. Guerra-Reyes also gives ethnographic attention to health care workers. She explains the class and educational backgrounds of traditional birth attendants and midwives, interviews doctors and health care administrators, and describes their interactions with local families. Interviews with national policy makers put the program in context.

Anthropological study of the relationship between modern and traditional medicine in Ethiopia, with a focus on Addis Ababa.

Nowadays a plethora of treatment technologies is available to the consumer, each employing a variety of concepts of the body, self, sickness and healing. This volume explores the options, strategies and consequences that are both relevant and necessary for patients and practitioners who are manoeuvring this medical plurality. Although wideranging in scope and covering areas as diverse as India, Ecuador, Ghana and Norway, central to all contributions is the observation that technologies of healing are founded on socially learned and to some extent fluid experiences of body and self.

An Open Secret traces the history of women's experiences with unwanted pregnancy and abortion in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia between the early 1950s and 2010. It finds that women's personal reproductive experiences contributed to shaping policies and services in reproductive health care.

Recognizing the interplay between biomedicine and indigenous medicine among the Mapuche in Southern Chile, this book explores notions of culture and personhood through the bodily experiences and medical choices of patients. Through case studies of patients in the context of medical pluralism, Kristensen argues that medical practices are powerful social symbol indicative of overarching socio-political processes. As certain types of extreme and violent experiences–known as olvidos–lack a framework that allows them to be expressed openly, they therefore surface as symptoms of an illness, often with no apparent organic pathology. In these contexts, indigenous medicine, thanks to its sensitivity to socio-political contexts, provides a space for articulation and management of collective experiences and suffering among patients in Southern Chile.