2 - Health Care Practice in a Multicultural Context: Western and Non-Western Assumptions

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This chapter discusses western and nonwestern health care practice in a multicultural context. Health practices in multicultural societies are complex and made up of a myriad of indigenous and foreign activities aimed at maintaining, promoting, and restoring health. Within multicultural societies, differences tend to reflect in health practices in the popular, folk, and professional sectors. Cross-national differences are greatly determined by the presence or absence of well developed, systematized, and recognized indigenous health systems. Subsequently, western biomedicine has penetrated and influenced almost every health care delivery system in the world, usually at the expense of indigenous health care systems. There is a greater variability in health care practices in the popular or folk sectors than in the professional sector, both within and across nations. When compared to Western biomedicine, indigenous health care systems tend to be more holistic in their therapeutic approaches, where the goal of therapy is not only correcting pathophysiologic processes but also promoting a harmonious relationship among the elements of the body, the mind, the spirit, and the social and natural environments.