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The Ravages Of Illness And Disease

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The ravages of illness and disease are elements that all people will eventually have to face at some point throughout the course of their lives. It is interesting to consider that disease is such a consistent force in life affecting people of all cultures equally, and yet every culture seems to have it’s own unique way of interpreting the causes of illness and treating diseases. Over the course of human history, there have been many cultures that have believed in the power of supernatural specters and the shamans who seek to cure the diseases and evils caused by those specters (Samovar et al 2010: 364). There are groups of people who believe that the body is a self-sufficient system that, with time, will heal itself. Even still there …show more content…

The idea behind biomedical treatment is that diseases may be discovered and cured through comprehensive medical research and treatment. Many of the treatments in the biomedical approach involve medical practitioners that perform surgeries or prescribe rigorously tested pharmaceutical medications. People who live in cultures that value the biomedical approach to health care will visit doctors when they feel like an abnormal event is occurring within the scope of their bodily functions, and the doctors will seek to remove or destroy the factor or factors believed to be the cause of the abnormality (Samovar et al 2010: 368-369). For those who believe in the biomedical approach, there seems to be a strong faith in the individual as an independent and autonomous being that is able to care for and treat itself.
The holistic traditional approach to health care, however, seems to hold a more fatalistic mindset in which one must adjust to the surrounding world to be healthy and happy, not the other way around (Samovar et al 2010: 365-366). The idea behind this fatalistic approach to the treatment of disease is that a person must seek to be in harmony with the world around them in order to live in good health. In addition, the person must realize that they must also seek to maintain harmony in their own being as they are an entire system within themselves that is made up of many

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