Health & Healing in Cross Cultural Perspective - Assignment Example

2. What may be considered normal within one culture may be considered as abnormal in another. Despite the presence of a universally valid system of recognizing the illness and its symptoms, yet cultural differences define behaviors in their own way. This is called cultural theory of normalcy and abnormalcy. A culture defines for a person what behavior he should adopt in order to be normal. For example, average age which is late for a menstrual period to come may be different in different cultures.

If a girl of 10 starts menstruating, she may be considered as abnormal in a culture where girls menstruate as late as fifteen. Thus, cultural differences define normal and abnormal behaviors. 3. Spirit possession empowers people in a way that they impart people such spiritual powers (like in Exorcist) that are unable to get without demonic possession. This is a common perspective in many cultures that a spirit has taken the control of a person’s body and he undergoes such powerful changes in the physical attributes like voice and etcetera, that we can say that he gets empowered.

Spirit possession enables one to be someone else. . 4. Susto is an ethnomedical syndrome that is usually found in Latin American culture. The concept revolves around the separation of soul from the physical body of a person. The belief is that the victim’s soul or soul of any of the members of his family is taken away through a frightful experience. The women and children may be the victims of this soul loss rather than the person who underwent the frightful occurrence, because they are the weaker members of the family.

Rubel and his colleagues found that susto was caused by self- perception of personal inadequacies when the victim is unable to meet social expectations. Hence, social stress was found to be the cause of susto. 5. The hot-cold theory of disease, of Mexican American culture, states that an illness, like food and colors, can be associated with being hot or cold. For example, menstrual cramps are considered as cold illness while pregnancy cramps are regarded as hot. This belief tends to make people comply with the treatment process much more powerfully.

The treatment then consists of such procedures that tend to neutralize the hotness or coldness of the disease, by treating it with a procedure of opposite quality. The health provider should understand the patient’s cultural view on this theory and should proceed accordingly. Giving cold juices in cold illness like flu may lead to patient noncompliance. Hot drinks like tea and coffee can be advised otherwise. 6. Biomedicine is a part of natural diseases causation ethnomedical system because it is based on scientific judgments and clinical procedures of treatments.

It is not like primitive medicine which is based on the concept that magic and the possession of supernatural spirits can be used in healing, nor it is like folk medicine which is based on