Health and Healing

Global Discourse and

Traditional Healing

International Patients

Each culture and society has formulated myths, belief systems, adaptive strategies, specialized cultural knowledge, and healing techniques.

Within the twenty-first century, midst modernity, globalization and the age of information, these healing techniques are no longer confined to the regions of their origination and cultural enclaves.

Illness has .....

both shaped and altered kinship roles societal expectations and rituals economic and ecological strategies and further defined each culture’s medicinal acceptations and practices (Atler: 2005: 3; Penn: 2000).

Inspired many more to explore its causes and its effects

And even more to heal!

Man is perpetually caught within the web

Of ReligionMagic

and Science

Rise of Western medicine

Brought scientific methodSeeming dominance

Artificial Division of Science and ReligionLife and medicine

Classification of Traditional/Indigenous Healing Methods as OTHER!

Thailand 2006-2006 Conferenceand connectedness.

Traditional Medicine Usage

Alma Ata and Issues1971 James RestonBarefoot Doctors

Who can be called a medical professional?

What is medicine and how can we gauge healing?

What are accepted standards and when should they be applied?

Why aren't there more integrated temas of healers and M.D. s?

Indigenous ResponsesHybrid Discourse

Anxious to save their lands promote cultural understanding and

continuity, Ecologically and economically sustainable living, tribal and ethnic

recognition and self-determination (Neizen: 2003)

ApprenticeshipsHealing Villages

Collaboration

Healers, Shamans, medicine men

Healers, shamans, medicine men and women--those committed to the sacred art of healing, (Turner: 2005) who heal because they are called to do so through whatever methods and means available to them.

As Rosita Arvigo (1994) highlighted, this is a sacred pact. It is not entered into lightly and the (Turner: 2005) path that leads one to engage in its practices is often as unique as the healers themselves.

Dr. Rosita and don Eligio Panti

Collaboration

Projects in Africa with Traditional Healers

Many ways of “mining or harvesting” Information

Difficulties

Learning to see the world through “Native eyes.”

Healing Villages

Cultural revitalizationEconomic sustainability

Healers as cultural brokers restoring connections

among people and with the land and the Source*

SustainabilityHeal People and the earth

Sacred relationships

Tales of experience travel on...

And every moment in every place every society faces illness of a loved one

and the quest for true healing continues