Articles about "traditional medicine"

Realidades socioculturales

Traditional medicine: Where are the life, suffering, violence and mortalities in native peoples?

  • Eduardo L. Menéndez

Keywords: biomedicine, exclusions, traditional medicine, methodology, transactions.

Abstract: This text describes and analyzes the processes of exclusion or secondaryization that exist in local studies of traditional medicine with respect to a whole series of health/disease/care/prevention processes that operate in the life of native peoples, despite the fact that most of these processes are included in the uses and customs of these peoples. The main exclusions reviewed refer to epidemiological processes, and especially to maternal mortality, as well as to close violence, childbirth and culturally forced child and youth relationships. It is shown that these studies exclude processes that are part of the native cultures and that generate a partial and distorted vision of their life, which does not allow understanding the current social, cultural and economic rationality of these peoples.