Transference to Patients and Others
The effects of such a verbal catharsis are long remembered and often quoted or referred to throughout the remainder of a course. The awareness we gain helps us understand the behavior and beliefs of patients and, for that matter, other people better. Given this understanding, we are comfortable enough to ask patients how they interpret a symptom and how they think it ought to be treated. We begin to be more sensitive to people who delay in seeking health care or fail to comply with preventive measures and treatment regimens. We come to recognize that we do the same thing. The increased familiarity with home health/HEALTH practices and remedies helps us project this awareness and understanding to the patients who are served.
Analyzed from a “scientific” perspective, the majority of these practices have a sound basis. In the area of health/HEALTH maintenance (see Table 7–1), one notes an almost universal adherence to activities that include rest, balanced diet, and exercise.
In the area of health/HEALTH protection, various differences arise, rang- ing from visiting a physician to wearing a clove of garlic around the neck. Al- though the purpose of wearing garlic around the neck is “to keep the evil spirit away,” the act also forces people to stay away: What better way to cut down exposure to wintertime colds than to avoid close contact with people?
One person remembered that during her childhood her mother forced her to wear garlic around her neck. Like most children, she did not like to be different from the rest of her schoolmates. As time went on, she began to have frequent colds, and her mother could not understand why this was happening. The mother followed her child to school some weeks later and discovered that she removed the garlic on her way to school, hiding it under a rock and then replacing it on the way home. There was quite a battle between the mother and
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daughter! The youngster did not like this method of protection because her peers mocked her.
A discussion of home remedies is of further interest when each of the methods presented is analyzed for its possible “medical” analogy and for its prevalence among various religious and ethnic groups. Many of the practices and remedies, to the surprise and relief of students, tend to run throughout groups but have different names or contain different ingredients.
In this day of computers and sophisticated medicine, including trans- plants, cloning, and intricate surgery, the most prevalent need expressed by people who practice traditional medicine is to protect people and prevent “evil” from harming them or to remove the “evil” that may be the cause of their HEALTH problem. As students, we analyze and discuss a problem and its tradi- tional treatments and we begin to see how evil continues to be considered the cause of ILLNESS and how often the treatment is then designed to remove it.
Each person testifies to the efficacy of a given remedy. Many state that, when their grandmothers and mothers shared these remedies with them, they experienced great feelings of nostalgia for the good old days, when things seemed so simple. Some people may express a desire to return to these prac- tices of yesteryear, whereas others openly confess that they continue to use such measures—sometimes in addition to what a health care provider tells them to use or often without even bothering to consult a provider.
The goal of this kind of consciousness-raising session is to reawaken the participant to the types of health/HEALTH practices within her or his own family. The other purpose of the sharing is to make known the similarities and differ- ences that exist as part of a cross-ethnocultural and religious phenomenon. We are intrigued to discover the wide range of beliefs that exists among our peers’ families. We had assumed that people thought and believed as we did. For the first time, we individually and collectively realize that we all practice a certain amount of traditional medicine, that we all have ethnocultural-specific ways of treating ILLNESS, and that we, too, often delay in seeking professional health care. We learn that most people prefer to treat themselves at home and that they have their own ways of treating a particular set of symptoms—with or without a prescribed medical regimen. The previously held notion that “everybody does it this way” is shattered. The greatest challenge in this activity is to encourage students and others to think of HEALTH, rather than simply health. This exercise brings you to the window on the glass door pictured in the introduction.