Nature cure and public health: illness narratives, medical efficacy, and existential suffering

Abstract

Nature cure is a globalized system of nineteenth century European medicine that developed synergistically in opposition to biomedicine, and that has become popular in India. This essay examines the question of how anthropologists should understand claims that all diseases can be cured with earth, air, sunlight, water and raw food. The question is complicated by a paradox of relativism deeply embedded in the desire to find cures, to articulate those cures as panaceas, and to the way illness narratives personalize and essentialize contexts of meaning that resolve sickness and suffering with experiential healing. Focused on suffering that motivates people to experiment on themselves and engage in exotic cures, this essay presents an argument for extending skepticism concerning claims of efficacy to a politics of medicine and public health that is ecological rather than phenomenological, medical or biological. Suffering, as well as empathy for those who suffer, transforms radically relativized personal convictions into forms of embodied, existential activism that relate to, but extend beyond, the hegemony of biomedicine and institutionalized public health.