Personalistic And Naturalistic Beliefs In Health Care

Laura Bouck

Anthropology 301

Professor Isabelle Placentia

Synthesis #2

Patients’ beliefs regarding health issues may have a major impact on what clinical care they receive. They can hinder precautionary efforts or complicate medical care and instead use rituals or folk remedies that can be either beneficial or dangerous to the patient. Medical systems are groups of diverse medical and health care systems, practices, and products that are not necessarily considered part of conventional medicine, but are examples of how people think and act about well being and healing. These medical systems may be ideas and practices that may have been evolved in Western or non-Western cultures. In class we learned that ethnomedicine is the study of medical

systems or healing practices of a cultural group, and the cross-cultural comparison of such systems. Essentially, ethnomedicine concerns the study of medical systems from the native’s point of view and also explains how to “understand what sickness is; how it is understood and directly experienced acted on by suffered, their social networks, and healer; and how health related beliefs and practices fit within and are shaped by encompassing social and cultural systems and social and environmental context” (Singer pg. 99).
There are two models of sickness: disease and illness. “The terms ‘disease’ and ‘illness’ are used by medical anthropologists to describe the different views of ill-health held by doctors and their patients” (Helman, pg. 1). Disease and illness are two terms that have been used interchangeably. A disease is a pathological abnormality in an organ or organ system while illness is a subjective experience (feelings that might come from having a disease). “Illness is only a specialized form of misfortune or bad luck within this wider model. It therefore shares the psychological, moral and social dimensions associated with other forms of adversity, especially in answering the question "Why has it happened to me?” (Helman, pg. 3).
What is clear is that disease is something the organ has, while illness is something the man feels. For example, the patient can go to a doctor with their illness and then go home with the practitioner’s perspective as having a measureable symptom (a disease).
Because there are different definitions of disease and illness, one needs to understand the categorization of causation of sickness.

There are personalistic and naturalistic causation beliefs of sickness. A personalistic system of beliefs involves supernatural beings or human beings with special powers that cause illness. This belief system means that every single sickness is personal/ occurs because of some superstitious belief. We learned in class about a mother who had just given birth but the baby was not breathing properly. The mother believed that because her family had been cursed, her baby was suffering because of that curse. The sick person is always the target of the entity sending the sickness and is therefore always considered to be the victim. Many Navajo persons believe in personalistic beliefs. Another category of sickness is a naturalistic approach. On the other hand, a naturalistic system of belief shows that sickness is caused by an impersonal systematic imbalance between natural forces or conditions. A proper balance must be maintained and harmony should be protected. For example, if a patient ha, then the equilibrium between binary opposites is lacking. Because the patient has an extremely high temperature (hot) and believes there is a naturalistic cause, then the patient would be treated with some sort of cooling medication. This is also an example of how humoral medicine is put into practice. “Although binary opposition is perhaps a

universal characteristic of human thought, a systematic binary structure underlying an equilibrium model to explain health, illness, and curing is by no means universal. These all stem from the Three Great Medical Systems: (Greek-Roman Humoral, Indian Ayurvedic, Chinese Humoral). All these three systems conform to an equilibrium model: with humors in balance, an individual is healthy; when the humoral balance is upset, illness follows (Foster, pg. 4).” Therapies in all three systems attempt to restore the lost humoral balance that is very important in the naturalistic causation belief.
In Touching the Timeless, we learned that the Huichol must make the pilgrimage every year so that the world would continue on.

This was their worldview by ensuring the existence of the world through the pilgrimage and with that they were “walking in beauty.” Once someone had experienced a disease, they began a journey of “natural order.” During this journey the Huichol practiced by living every day in a continuous loving way. By walking in beauty, the Huichol could go through life by living in peace, unity and abundance (their worldview). In one of the scenes, there was a painting that the Huichol drew on the ground during a healing ritual. This painting symbolized Gods, fashioned their world and channeled their healing powers. I think that the painting represented walking in beauty fully. Once the boy was healed, I realized that this was a window that opened up their two worlds and the beauty of people. By living this way they were able to chant their world into existence every day by walking through beauty and continuingly living their lives to the

fullest.