Notes on the article by A.Viladrich “Beyond the Supernatural: Latino Healers Treating Latino Immigrants in NYC”

The article explores the role of Latino folk healers in adequately addressing immigrants’ health needs, including their potential to complement or replace formal access to health care services.

“More than competing with other healing businesses, [Latino healers] are filling a gap by providing cultural meaningful treatments while satisfying Latinos’ unmet needs…. Botanicas offer personalized response to problems that would either receive little attention or remain unattended otherwise”(p. 144)

This quote states an important point – that besides the actual healing practice, besides the ceremonies and selling the herbal supplements, the botanicas provide the necessary spiritual care to patients, who would not be able to receive this care anywhere else. 

This characteristic of botanicas places them in the center of cultural community and new social connections are built within and through it:

“Shared healing beliefs become a meaningful channel through which Latino healers are able to constrict a community of social interests that exceeds their inner differences.” (p. 142)

Thus, I wonder, is there any way in which Latino healers could make part of the hospital system where they would help spiritual care providers to fill the gap and address the vital issues for Latino immigrants? 

As often in similar works, we see that the traditional Latino healers support a holistic philosophy of life in which the natural and the supernatural, the physical and the spiritual no longer represent two contradictory selves but complementary sides of the same healing equation. 

What I found even more interesting is that the healers are not only eager to “experiment with fluid frontiers between the magic, the religious, the biomedical and the spiritual realms, but that they also seem comfortable crossing disciplinary boundaries and religious territories, in which the sacred and the profane turn into dynamic systems of unfixed nature.” (p. 138)

I wonder what can we learn from this? Could it be that the story of flexible boundaries not only between different approaches to healing but also between different religious beliefs holds within itself a key to most personalized service?