Modern Hipocratic Medicine and Traditional Mapuche Medicine

Abstract

There is a growing demand for a kind of health care that does not bridle syndromes with drugs that reduce the need for environmental change and block the healing properties of symptoms, forgetting that fever kills viruses, that inflamation improves tissue damage, that insomnia opens cognition, that sadness mobilizes support. When, through chemistry, symptoms are diminished, then the environment stays aggressive, the disease becomes chronic and drug addiction is ushered in. The mapuche medical system can contribute to the development of the biopsychosocial or socio-biological approach presently proposed by the Public Health doctrine. Mapuche culture conceives reality as “ a single whole made up of man , the environment and a set of beings and forces endowed with power and which govern the first two components “. The mapuche conception of an “open body” makes it impossible to isolate physiology from social environment- including the ethical regulation of human behaviour. This viewpoint enables us to understand that health- and-disease are not just internal states of the body but- rather – the reflection of its “being in the world”.