A question of medicine answering

Abstract

Biomedicine although institutionally powerful in Sri Lanka has not been able to depersonalize illness or promote a notion of treatment efficacy disconnected from social relations. An ideology of healing crosscuts the trend toward health commodification. This paper focuses on three concepts fundamental to the interactive dynamics of treatment efficacy: constitution, habit, and power of the hand. A movement between two distinct types of health care seeking behavior is described. One is inspired by finding the right medicine fix, the other by finding a practitioner having a sensitivity toward one's sense of person and all this entails.

Literacy and motivation for the prevention and control of hypertension among female community health volunteers: a qualitative study from Nepal

“…According to studies, FCHVs have a unique ability to provide successful healthcare to the members of their communities, because they share beliefs and general health-seeking behaviour with their patients/peers. The FCHVs are responsible for connecting their patients to the health post and educating the members of their communities about biomedical practices, but they possess a unique ability to provide healthcare that is concordant with the patient's life ( 21 ). They are able to engage in effective patient–provider communication, know and respect community norms and share habits with their patients, which allow them to empathise with those they serve ( 22 ).…”

Paradox in Treatment Seeking: An Experience From Rural Sri Lanka

“…The side effects of treatment were not mentioned as a major barrier to the utilization of Western medicines on most occasions. Nichter and Nordstrom (1989) reported that villagers in their sample felt that "being accustomed" to certain types of medicine was necessary for these treatments to relieve illness. This seems to play a major part in selecting the type of the medicine and treatment in rural Sri Lanka.…”

Why psychiatrists in India prescribe so many drugs

“…The above quote highlights the particular interest in injections, an interest that appears to be widespread in less developed countries, the implications of which have been discussed by a number of authors (including Cunningham 1970;Kleinman 1980;Wyatt 1984;Greenhalgh 1987;Nichter 1989;Reeler 1990). Injections carry the technological authority of modernity (cf.…”

“…Sachs and Tomson (1992) discuss how such presuppositions in Ayurvedic tradition encourage polypharmacy in allopathic clinics in Sri Lanka. Nichter (1989) has described how laypersons make use of humoral concepts in formulating their own strategies for assessing, obtaining and combining medications in southern India.…”

“…India was the launching ground for one of the strongest perorations against the idea of applying biomedical cures to problems whose root causes were more likely to be found in poverty, malnutrition, inadequate water and poor sanitation (Djurfeldt and Linden 1976). More recently, Mark Nichter's research in southern India (1980Nichter and Nordstrom 1989) has offered the most thorough investigation available of laypersons' attitudes towards medicinal drugs and of the process of health care commodification, through which the idea of health as a natural outcome of healthful living is being replaced by "the notion that health in the short term can be derived through the consumption of medicines" (1989: 233). As India is changing to a capitalist, cash-based, wage-labor economy, the purchase of massmanufactured drugs has been increasing, both those of indigenous medical systems like Ayurveda and those of the cosmopolitan medicine usually referred to in India as "allopathic ''2 or "'angrezi" [English] medicine.…”