Healing Herbs And Dangerous Doctor By Jan Pylypa Summary

Doctors are the main source of medicine in America. When someone is sick, they go to the doctor’s office. If we need surgery, we go to a doctor. There are many aspects of the medical system that is put into the hands of American doctors and most people do not question their doctors. In some countries this is not the case. In other countries around the world, there is less use of doctors to cure sicknesses. Instead the people, who are sick, go see shamans or herbalists. The article Healing Herbs and Dangerous Doctors Fruit Fever and Community Conflicts with Biomedical Care in Northeast Thailand discussed the different views of the medical system. There were several interviews that were performed by the author Jen Pylypa to collect the data that …show more content…
Interpretive Medical Anthropology is one of the core concepts of our class that directly correlates with this reading. IMA looks at how the experience of being sick or having a disability can be shaped by culture or social experience. There were many stories of how awful the doctors were with patients who had fruit fever. There was never a good outcome when a person with fruit fever went to the hospital to see a doctor. These experiences shaped the opinion of the people in those villages. The people in the communities looked for a different way to help the people with fruit fever. The social connection between the doctor’s lack of knowledge of fruit fever gave the community reason to doubt the doctor’s ability to …show more content…
The apprentice learned the different traits of being a shaman. Before the apprentice went off to do his first appointment on his own the older shamans told him their secret. The secret was to put chicken fathers in his mouth before going to the appointment. During the trance he would have to put his mouth on the skin of the person and pretend to suck. Then bite your cheek so there is blood on the feathers and then spit them out of your mouth. The strange thing was that this lie actually helps people get better. The idea that the sickness was out of the person was more important then actually making them better. This goes along with the article because of the alternate type of medicine. Medicine was did not work, but the idea that this bad stuff is out of your body had an over welling affect. Although the herbalists do not use medication they efforts seem more natural to the villagers. The culture plays a big role of how these people look at medicine. Since the doctors were unable to help the sick with the IV drips then they need to look for a natural way to help the