Notes on “Healing Logics” edited by Erica Brady

This book is a collection of essays that was put together after the Utah State University’s conference on folk medicine, which made it evident that existing models of investigation and research proved to be limiting in exploration of the health belief systems that exist in multitude in the US. 

The general conclusion of this conference (and the collection of essays) is that these health belief systems are built on the bases of very diverse sources of authority, such as community and ethnic tradition, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, and persecutions of the formal medicine. Through the essays we can observe the relationship between these systems of authority being competing, conflicting, and mutually complementary. 

Because of the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the U.S. population, American folk medicine bears the influences of healing traditions and practices from all over the world. While there is a considerable range of  folk medicine systems, many of these systems share a number of fundamental concepts, such as: primary transmission through oral means; view of health as harmony or balance; interrelation of body, mind, and spirit; vitalism (body being animated by a type of energy); supernatural elements and magic; thoughts and emotions as etiological factors; concern with underlying causes; existence of positive and negative energies; strong element of morality. 

Another characteristic of folk medicine that could be generalized is that it is highly individualized and case-specific, meaning that there is no one treatment for a disease, but rather the person is being treated as a whole, with all the complexity of his life and spiritual condition. 

It has been shown that most of the folk healers often insist that their patients see medical doctors, thus, it proves to be complementary rather than competing to the allopathic medicine. Despite this fact, most physicians are unaware that their patients are also being cared for my practitioners of alternative medicine. The primary reasons that patients often don’t tell their physicians about their alternative treatments are the fear of negative feedback, dismissive comments, or simply lack of interest. 

Some essays are based on the field experience of their authors, which had brought them to a new dimension of understanding folk medicine, having experienced, witnessed, and studied it from within. The issue of supernatural and magic is usually sort of spread out in these essays, as the authors often don’t have a strong precise opinion about it, or rather not valid enough from scientific point of view to be shared in academic work. Thus, we find a categorization of ways to deal with the ideas of magic and its utility for solving real-world problems: from functionalist perspective magic provides explanations for otherwise unexplainable phenomena; structural approach views magic as shaping reality to fit one’s understanding; from the symbolists’ perspective magic is a metaphor used to express meaning poetically. 

The bottom line of these essays, it seems, lies in the words of David Hufford quoted on page 207. While talking about the field study, he called it the “experience-centered scholarship” and noted its primary advantage in helping to “foster the idea that cultural diversity in thinking is neither a virtuous political exercise nor a threat to science, but a rich and underestimated course of insight for humankind in general”.

One of the most prominent points in this book is the constant concept of harmony and balance that is seen as vital for health and wellbeing in most folk medical systems. This balance can be among bodily regulatory functions, or the person’s psychological conditions, such as the thought patterns and emotions. 

The concept of necessary balancing of the cold and hot, upward and downward movement of fluids, activity and rest is quite similar to the approach found in the Chinese medicine where the balance between Yin and Yang, feminine and masculine, and the five elements that guide our internal organs is considered essential for the wellbeing of the person. Same similarity is seen in the idea about the interrelation of body, mind, and spirit, which can be found in the Chinese medical system and Ayurveda. We have previously read that from the perspective of the Chinese medicine the body is animated by the Qi life energy, which is literally the same idea as found in most folk medicine systems that attribute the “gift” of life to a special type of force, energy, or essence. 

From the psychosomatic perspective, such factors as obsessive, fearful, or negative thoughts and extremes of emotions (especially negative) are often considered contributory in different types of disease or illness, and folk medical practitioners believe that addressing these issues is necessary for healing to be complete, which makes them holistic practitioners. 

While folk healing systems generally include recognition of some types of illness that are not recognized as disease categories in the biomedical diagnostic canon, these illnesses are referred to by scholars and health professionals as “folk illnesses,” sometimes also called “culture-bound syndromes” (p. 24). This concept of “folk illness” is an academic construct which takes the diagnostic and etiological categories of biomedicine as its reference point. The implication of the label is that an illness so referenced is not “real,” or at least is not “really” what people who accept it as real believe it to be. 

I see this attitude as dismissive which in no way helps anybody involved. The person suffering from the “folk illness” would feel stressed, neglected, mistrusted, and dismissed by his medical provider. This, in turn, will fuel the mistrust from the patient, which will cause him to hide from his “official” doctor the alternative care he is receiving. Sometimes, if the patient has much trust in his physician it may even cause him to stop alternative treatment, from which he would otherwise benefit.  

I find it surprising that after all the evidence of folk medicine being beneficial for the patients, there is still so much resistance for its integration with allopathic medicine. In one of the essays it is mentioned that doctors at the Indian Health Service hospital in Tuba City, Arizona, had started allowing Navajo chanters to visit patients in the hospital, in the hopes that hearing a trusted and familiar voice would make them feel more at home and relaxed. Indeed it did, and the doctors had a sense that healing rates and successful treatments had gone up. 

“They were not prepared to discover one day that the chanters also were able to bring Navajos out of comas almost every time (80% of cases – unless there had been massive brain damage)” (p. 204). 

This is just one of the countless examples of the “unexplained” workings of folk medicine. As proposed in this book, instead of dismissing that which is difficult to measure or observe it as obviously “unscientific,” we should seek new ways to measure, replicate, and validate empirical experiences.