Pamela Erickson DB3 - Discussion on Ethnomedicine PDF

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Discussion on Ethnomedicine...

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Pamela Erickson’s article on “The Healing Lessons of Ethnomedicine” portrayed quite explicitly the advantages of ethnomedicine over biomedicine when considering their integrative, holistic approach toward disease and illness. Her argument on the interdependence between mind and body as a key point of divergence between each medical system highly resonated with me as a psychology major. The duality of the mind-body paradigm has been a critical point of debate within numerous scientific fields – its discussion prompting the abridgement of the mental and the physical as a synergic whole. The more contemporary research of the body’s psycho-neuro-immunological pathways has been pivotal in advancing the move of biomedicine back into prior ideologies of body and mind in coalition. However, for the greater part of its history and execution, biomedicine lacked the mechanisms needed to incorporate psychological and social determinants of health to their examination of disease causation. How I have come to understand through the last week’s modules, the study of health – taking into account both disease and illness – is strikingly progressive and compensating when integrating a political ecology framework. The analysis of a wide array of factors, ranging from the economic to the spiritual, need to be considered in order for the body to not be probed as a purely biological and molecular entity. The diagnosis and treatment provided by biomedicine fails to perceive the patient as an agent influenced by both natural and environmental forces. Without such an interconnected perspective to examine disease and illness, biomedicine cannot cater to the overarching demands of patients in the holistic way that ethnomedicine does. Erickson presents clear-cut reasoning on how the inclusion of myriad dimensions – political, social, biological, psychological, etc. – in ethnomedicine promotes their greater contextualization of health.

What specific mechanisms or initiatives can biomedicine continue to take in order to transition into a more holistic health system? What can be incorporated into its treatment methods – largely pharmaceuticals and surgery – to support a view that supports healing and not solely curing?...