A south Indian Case Study
Mark Nichter
Anthropology and International Health, Asian Case
studies
General overview
In this
article M.Nichter describes the common ways medicines are thought of and
spoken about in South Karana district and he gives a correction to the
misleading stereotype of rural villagers thinking with an ayurvedic
cognitive framework. He will discuss different paths of health care
seeking associated with market and pre-capitalist values: securing good
medicine at a reasonable cost and the seeking of a practioner who has
the power of the hand to heal a particular patient. When looking at
these two values he considers the following as important: the
realization that the type of therapy system a practitioner is affiliated
with is of less importance than the form and quality of despensed
medicines, and the evaluation of medicine appropriatesnes in terms of
illness and patient characteristics.
There is a generalizations about ayurveda in India, he says:
- discrete ayurvedic practices and medicines, and not a ayurvedic model of health and pathology,
influence popular health care behaviour
- orthodox ayurveda is not a
popular form of therapy available to the massess
- the system system of
ayurveda presented is not understood by most herbal practitioners: there
is a gaining of knowledge through special magazines which combine ayurveda
with allopatic medicine, creating scientization of ayurveda and
emphasizing the long glorious and sacred tradition.
There is an intermixing of different systems in the
healthcare arena, and villagers explore their options within this
expanding arena. They are attentative to costs of therapy, to practioner's
availability and reputation. The "power of the hand" is a very
important concept: the general costs of a practitioner and his healing
capacity.More important however are the kind of medicines he dispenses and the kind of medical paraphernalia he owns.
The perception of medicine copatibility depends on what
patient expects to happen after consuming a medicine and when they expect
symptoms to abate. And partly because of tis client demands take forms of
illness and age specific preferences for forms of medicine associated with
ideas about medicine habituation, compatibility and power.
Nichter explores all these ideas in to depth in this article, which makes a good reading.
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