Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions

Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions. By Bonnie Blair O'Connor. University of Pennsylvania Press Studies in Health, Illness, and Caregiving. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Pp. 287, introduction, illustrations, appendix, glossary, bibliography, index. $36.95 cloth, $16.95 paper) In Healing Traditions: Alternative Medicine and the Health Professions, Bonnie Blair O'Connor seeks to accomplish two interrelated aims: to document the great number and variety of systems of health belief and practice active in the United States today and to demonstrate the need for health professionals and planners to understand and respect those systems as well as the people who participate in them. As an academically trained folklorist and medical school educator with a strong background in cultural theory and ethnographic research, O'Connor brings to her subject a wide range of talents and experiences, all of which are apparent in the book's five main chapters as well as in the appendix, glossary, bibliography, and other ancillary materials. The first chapter-Defining and Understanding Health Belief Systems-establishes a strong theoretical foundation for the work as a whole, giving particular attention to the view...that knowledge and descriptions of reality are culturally shaped; that facts are not `discovered whole' in nature, but are constructed out of selective observations and interpretations, according to shared, often tacit, rules and values (7). When applied to the diverse health care systems currently active in the United States, O'Connor argues, cultural theory calls into question both the privileged position of medicine-the officially sanctioned medical system of modern Western societies (5)-and the various stereotypical representations of vernacular healing traditions-nonconventional or unofficial health belief systems and their local, familial, and personal variations (6). The cultural theory articulated in Chapter 1 is also foregrounded in Chapter 2: Critical Approaches to Literature and Theories. Beginning with a contrastive analysis of older evolutionary and survivals theories and more recent paradigms of interdisciplinarity and multiculturalism, O'Connor offers selective but illuminating reviews of recent research in folklore, anthropology, nursing, biomedicine, and related disciplines. While these reviews indicate several promising trends, such as the development of a health systems model in folk medical studies, they also reveal a number of ongoing problems, ranging from the lack of substantive descriptions of health belief systems and their underlying theories...in the medical literature (70) to the persistent opposition of many practitioners of conventional medicine to all forms of alternative healing. Virtually all of these disciplinary perspectives are brought to bear on the issues raised in the two case studies presented in Chapter 3, Hmong Cultural Values, Biomedicine, and Chronic Liver Disease, and Chapter 4, Vernacular Health Care Responses to HIV and AIDS. …