Eastern Western Medecine

Shamanism, a twenty thousand-year-old practice encompassing the concept of priest, healer, and magician, understands the danger in isolating the body from the spirit. Shamans see the intrusion of disease as the result of a loss in the power one holds over oneself . Such a loss of power is normally experienced during a spiritual crisis or when an individual is the victim of harm to their spiritual being due to societal tensions. Shamans’ main interests are in the spiritual health of their patient and they heal by bridging the gap between the individual and the universe . Often shamans serve as communal redresser, balancing social tension through ritual.

The Western medical model, in search of a solid science, denies all notions of the interconn

These shamanic practices, while veiled in a symbolic and mythical guise, are focused on maintaining the underlying social and communal network of relations. This type of shamanic practice, as Turner deems with the Ndembu, is a “Ritual of Affliction”, being a “phase in the complex process of corporate life… (which) has a redressive function in interpersonal or factional disputes” . Therapy in these cases performs the dual function of sealing up breaches in social relationships while simultaneously releasing the patient of his pathological symptoms . Turner concludes that the shaman sees his task less as curing an individual as remedying the ills afflicting the corporate group and that the patient will not get better until the tensions and aggression causing the group’s struggle have been exposed to ritual treatment . These rituals that are seeped in emotion and spirituality contrast heavily with the rituals of diagnosis and treatment that constitute the Western medical model.

The cornerstone of Western medical thought is centered on the assumptions of the individual as objective and the body as material. Micozzi imparts that the body is therefore treated by “Sending drug molecules to affect cell receptors. [and] Cutting out parts that do not work, replacing parts that fail”. He continues relating that regardless of these clearly mechanistic methods having great success in fixing afflicting problems, that lack efficacy in healing the person and maintaining health . The isolation of disease from individual and the objectification of body parts and their functions attributed to Western medicine has created a situation in which it has become difficult to distinguish the human in the body. Bankart offers a Suffi maxim to illustrate the situation, “Show a man too many camels’ bones, and show them too him too often, and he will lose his ability to recognize a camel, even when he sees a live one” .

For shamans and the societies that they serve disease is not a foreign invader born from and harbored within the individual. Shamans instead view disease and the symptoms of disease as symbols of an illness born of spiritual crisis or a disharmony in the society’s social construct . Taussig argues, in non-Western medical models, “signs and symptoms of disease are not ‘things-in-themselves’, they are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity” . Therefore, physical manifestations do not comprise the focus of the shaman a

Some topics in this essay:
, Performances” Malay, Ndembu Malay, Western Alternative, Vulnerable Observer, Anthropology Quarterly, medical model, western medical, western medical model, Carol Laderman, Ndembu Malaysian, western medicine, mind body, construction illness, one’s body, spiritual health, western medicine created, illness western, bridging gap, symptoms disease, gap individual universe, bridging gap individual,