Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I find Mansfield et al.’s (2002) piece on the intersections of faith in God, healing, and meaning of illness interesting for two reasons. First, Mansfield et al.’s revelation that faith and religious beliefs represent important variables in patient’s healing process is intriguing. They found that: “Many people in this region of the Southern Eastern United States (80%) believe that God acts through medical doctors to cure illness. Almost 9 out of 10 African Americans in this region see physicians as instruments of God’s will” (Mansfield et.al.2002, p.406). As illustrated in the quotation, faith in God is central in healing among Christians. As a Christian, I could not agree more with the authors. Among the Christian community, it is a norm to state that “God willing, or by his Grace”, coinages that represent our faith in the power of God to make all things possible. Second, I find the piece interesting because of its similarity with emerging trend in Nigeria. The proliferation of Pentec...

Today I had another interview with one of the volunteers for our project. Something she mentioned to me in our conversation was that she is a private individual. She has no family who live in the area. It’s just her boyfriend and her. She admitted that they have no friends really… no one they share experiences with, commiserate with, and celebrate milestones with. I asked her what encouraged her desire to be private. Pride. She and her boyfriend do not want to make widely known their tough circumstances. She doesn’t want others to feel like she is relying on them for anything that, perhaps, they are also struggling to maintain. While the strong sense of pride is unique among the three interviews I’ve been involved with so far, the lack of a network is not. My interview with this woman took place shortly after I had read the article on breastfeeding. In this article, Cripe discusses the difference in privileged, educated women/mothers and low-income mothers. She offers a quote from US...

In considering the “alternative ways of healing and knowing” theme for class this week, as well as the accompanying readings, I was encouraged to push beyond my own traditional conceptualizations of “appropriate” medical care to acknowledge the ways in which complementary, alternative, and oriental medicine can be equally, if not more, beneficial. I felt myself constantly questioning if the potential benefits of fully adopting an integrative approach to medicine could outweigh the potential problems (or perhaps better framed as “additional work”) that such adoption would present. As I read the report commissioned by the IOM summit, I couldn’t help be surprised at the many ways an integrative medicine approach could be used to aid our ailing health system. For instance, a guiding principle of CAM rests in the idea that interventions that are natural and less invasive should be used whenever possible. Drawing from a prior post of mine regarding the problems of overtreatment in the medica...

Tonight in our "Culture and Health" class, we discussed the meaning of humility in the lives of scholars, about how without humility, we become the "frog in the well" who defines her/his lifeworld from the boundaries of the well. To this frog in the well, the well is the best place in the world because it offers democracy, freedom, liberty, modern medicine, scientific progress and everything Western. Also, to the frog in the well, other cultures are unenlightened and need to be saved. That the frog itself might be in need for enlightenment does not ever cross the frog because she/he is content with the messages of cultural chauvinism that have been fed to her/him since childhood. That other cultures and ways of knowing have something valuable to offer, that "others" whom we have been trained to construct as primitive have invaluable life lessons and knowledge to educate us, that our so called civilized practices might be most fundamentally uncivilized: t...

A lot of patients choose holistic medicine have been surveyed about why they chose holistic therapies said that they did so for spiritual reasons: They( Holistic doctors) had experienced events in their own lives that shifted them toward a holistic worldview in which the disparate pieces of reality seemed to fit together. This description in Zoller and Dutta (2008) reminds me of the understanding of traditional Chinese medicine. All the achieved doctors are senior aged. If patients entered a traditional Chinese medicine clinic, they expect someone who is the age of grandfather that rich of experience of medicine and life. Suppose there is a 30 years old doctor, patients will doubted inside previous anything he might say. Quite opposite, patients are more likely to accept some younger biomedicine physicians. They are supposed to be trained by the modern medical school and know more updated technology and method. Should we say that patients go to the holistic clinic for the communication...

The holistic pain management clinic in Zoller and Dutta (2008), and the bourgeoning popularity of Acupuncture as an efficacious healing method remind me of Mathew, a famous bone healer in a neighboring community in my home country Nigeria. Mathew was famous for miraculous fixing of broken bones resulting from different kinds of injuries, namely car accidents, football games, and more recently commercial cyclists. Accident victims with different degrees of injuries found succor in his magical skills. Mathew’s popularity assumed a crescendo in the 1990’s when the influx of motorcycles popularly known as “okada” a local coinage for a fast means of circumventing traffic in big cities led to rising cases of road traffic accidents and fracture injuries. Particularly interesting is the treatment of patients from orthopedic hospitals reputed for plaster of Paris (POP), which was a standard mode of treating patients with bone fracture. POP, which is a biomedical treatment, lasts for several mon...

In reading Mohan and Christina’s posts below, and comparing these to the reading on holistic healing, I can’t help but think about what it means to feel sick or experience pain. One of the excerpts from an interview with a patient includes the statement, “I think the acupuncture did gradually help, but, really, getting a hug from [Dr. Aparna] was the best medicine.” Sickness and pain truly are such a personal matter and, as we’ve discussed in class, a truly personal experience. Like any other personal issues we are faced to deal with, we, as protective individuals, are selective in whom we let into our inner circles of “knowing.” Most often, we let into our inner circle not just a loved one, but a trusted loved one. This is someone who is going to care deeply about what we’re dealing with. They don’t want us to hurt anymore (physically or emotionally). When I was a kid, I can remember having a high fever and my mom often telling me how she would take on the fever herself if that mea...