3.3: TECHNIQUES FOR HEALING

Western biomedicine tends to conceive of the human body as a kind of biological machine. When parts of the machine are damaged, defective, or out of balance, chemical or surgical interventions are the preferred therapeutic responses. Biomedical practitioners, who can be identified by their white coats and stethoscopes, are trained to detect observable or quantifiable symptoms of disease, often through the use of advanced imaging technologies or tests of bodily fluids like blood and urine. Problems detected through these means will be addressed. Other factors known to contribute to wellness, such as the patient’s social relationships or emotional state of mind, are considered less relevant for both diagnosis and treatment. Other forms of healing, which derive from non-biomedical ethno-etiologies, reverse this formulation, giving priority to the social and spiritual.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the body is thought to be governed by the same forces that animate the universe itself. One of these is chi (qi), a vital life force that flows through the body and energizes the body and its organs. Disruptions in the flow or balance of chi can lead to a lack of internal harmony and ultimately to health problems so TCM practitioners use treatments designed to unblock or redirect chi, including acupuncture, dietary changes, and herbal remedies. This is an example of humoral healing, an approach to healing that seeks to treat medical ailments by achieving a balance between the forces or elements of the body.

Communal healing, a second category of medical treatment, directs the combined efforts of the community toward treating illness. In this approach, medical care is a collaboration between multiple people. Among the !Kung (Ju/’hoansi) of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, energy known as num can be channeled by members of the community during a healing ritual and directed toward individuals suffering from illness. Richard Katz, Megan Bisele, and Verna St. Davis (1982) described an example of this kind of ceremony:

The central event in this tradition is the all-night healing dance. Four times a month on the average, night signals the start of a healing dance. The women sit around the fire, singing and rhythmically clapping. The men, sometimes joined by the women, dance around the singers. As the dance intensifies, num, or spiritual energy, is activated by the healers, both men and women, but mostly among the dancing men. As num is activated in them, they begin to kia, or experience an enhancement of their consciousness. While experiencing kia, they heal all those at the dance.[24]

While communal healing techniques often involve harnessing supernatural forces such as the num, it is also true that these rituals help strengthen social bonds between people. Having a strong social and emotional support system is an important element of health in all human cultures.

Faith and the Placebo Effect

Humoral and communal approaches to healing, which from a scientific perspective would seem to have little potential to address the root causes of an illness, present an important question for medical anthropologists. What role does faith play in healing? Sir William Osler, a Canadian physician who was one of the founders of Johns Hopkins Hospital, believed that much of a physician’s healing ability derived from his or her ability to inspire patients with a faith that they could be cured.[25]

In fact, there is a considerable amount of research suggesting that there is a placebo effect involved in many different kinds of healing treatments. A placebo effect is a response to treatment that occurs because the person receiving the treatment believes it will work, not because the treatment itself is effective.

In Western biomedicine, the placebo effect has been observed in situations in which a patient believes that he or she is receiving a certain drug treatment, but is actually receiving an inactive substance such as water or sugar. [27] Research suggests that the body often responds physiologically to placebos in the same way it would if the drug was real.[28] The simple act of writing a prescription can contribute to the successful recovery of individuals because patients trust that they are on a path that will lead to wellness.[29] If we consider the role of the placebo effect in the examples above, we should consider the possibility that humoral and communal healing are perceived to “work” because the people who receive these remedies have faith in them.

An interesting example of the complexity of the mind-body connection is found in studies of intercessory prayer: prayers made to request healing for another person. In one well-known study, researchers separated patients who had recently undergone heart surgery into two groups, one containing people who know they would be receiving prayers for their recovery and another group who would receive prayers without being aware of it. Those patients who knew they were receiving prayers actually had more complications and health problems in the month following surgery.[30] This reflects an interesting relationship between faith and healing. Why did the patients who knew that others were praying for them experience more complications? Perhaps it was because the knowledge that their doctors had asked others to pray for them made patients more stressed, perceiving that their health was at greater risk.

However, it can also be a lack of faith that drives people to look for alternative treatments. In the United States, alternative treatments, some of which are drawn from humoral or communal healing traditions, have become more popular among patients who believe that Western biomedicine is failing them. Cancer research facilities have begun to suggest acupuncture as a treatment for the intense nausea and fatigue caused by chemotherapy and scientific studies suggest that acupuncture can be effective in relieving these symptoms.[31] Marijuana, a drug that has a long recorded history of medical use starting in ancient China, Egypt, and India, has steadily gained acceptance in the United States as a treatment for a variety of ailments ranging from anxiety to Parkinson’s disease.[32] As growing numbers of people place their faith in these and other remedies, it is important to recognize that many alternative forms of healing or medicine lack scientific evidence for their efficacy. The results derived from these practices may owe as much to faith as medicine.

CITATION/ATTRIBUTION

Brown, N., McIlwraith, T., & González, L. T. de. (2020). Health and Medicine. Pressbooks.pub. https://pressbooks.pub/perspectives/chapter/health-and-medicine/