Examines Hmong American concepts of health, illness and healing, and looks at the Hmong American experience with conventional medicine. In this, it identifies factors that either obstruct or enable healthcare delivery to the Hmong.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this brilliantly reported and beautifully crafted book explores the clash between a medical center in California and a Laotian refugee family over their care of a child.
Healing by Heart is a book of stories--stories of people's search for culturally responsive health care from U.S. providers. It offers resources to providers and institutions committed to delivering culturally responsive health care, paying special attention to building successful relationships with traditional Hmong patients and families. It makes available extensive information about the health-related beliefs, practices, and values of the Hmong people, including photographs of traditional healing methods. Ranging in age from young infants to older adults, the patients in the stories present a wide range of health problems. The clinicians are from family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics, emergency medicine, surgery, obstetrics-gynecology, psychiatry/psychology, and hospice. Each of the fourteen case stories is accompanied by discussion questions as well as two or three commentaries. The commentaries--written by patients, family members, shaman, Western clinicians (including Hmong physicians, nurses, and social workers), medical anthropologists, health care ethicists, social workers, psychologists, and clergy--are rich in personal reflections on cross-cultural health care experiences. Readers are rewarded with a combination of perspectives, including those of Hmong authors who have not previously published in English and scholars with years of professional experience working with the Hmong in Laos, Thailand, and the United States. The editors offer a model for delivering culturally responsive health care with special attention to matters of cross-cultural health care ethics. The model identifies questions health care providers can focus on as they seek to understand the health-related moral commitments and practices prevalent in the cultural groups they serve, ethical questions that arise frequently and with great poignancy in cross-cultural health care relationships, and points to consider when a patient's treatment wish challenges the provider's professional integrity. By sharing stories of suffering, confusion, and success, Healing by Heart couples an accessible method of learning about others with concrete recommendations about how to enhance cross-cultural health care relationships.
Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the invisible worlds beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in every area of our lives from spirituality and health to work and relationships. With Shamanic Journeying, readers join world-renowned teacher Sandra Ingerman to learn the core teachings of this ancient practice and apply these skills in their own journey. Includes drumming for three shamanic journeys.
America's healthcare system in the twenty-first century faces a variety of pressures and challenges, not the least of which is that posed by the increasingly multicultural nature of American society itself. Large numbers among the Hmong, immigrants from the landlocked Asian nation of Laos, continue to prefer their own ancient medical traditions. That these Hmong Americans should continue to adhere to a tradition of folk medicine, rather than embrace the modern healthcare system of America, poses questions that must be answered. This book takes up the task of examining Hmong American concepts of health, illness and healing, and looks at the Hmong American experience with conventional medicine. In so doing, it identifies factors that either obstruct or enable healthcare delivery to the Hmong, specifically a target sample of Hmong Americans resident in Colorado. Drawing upon scientific methods of data collection, the research reveals attitudes currently held by a group of American citizens toward health and medicine which run the gamut from the very modern to those which have prevailed in the highlands of Southeast Asia for centuries.
Shamans throughout much of Asia are regarded as having the power to control and coerce spirits. Many Asians today still turn to shamans to communicate with the world of the dead, heal the sick, and explain enigmatic events. To understand Asian religions, therefore, a knowledge of shamanism is essential. Shamans in Asia provides an introduction to the study of shamans and six ethnographic studies, each of which describes and analyses the lives and activities of shamans in five different regions: Siberia, China, Korea, and the Ryukyu islands of southern Japan, Bangladesh and Pakistan. The essays show what type of people become shamans, what social roles they play, and how shamans actively draw from the worldviews of the communities in which they operate. As the first book in English to provide in-depth accounts of shamans from different regions of Asia, it allows students and scholars to view the diversity and similarities of shamans and their religions. Those interested in spiritual specialists, the anthropological study of religion, and local religions in Asia will be intrigued, if not entranced, by Shamans in Asia.
“Sacred Medicine is a book of inclusion. It does not prescribe nor preach nor proselytize: it illustrates, informs, and illuminates.” —From the foreword by Dr. Gabor Maté, author of When the Body Says No and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts In 2007, Lissa Rankin left a promising career in medicine to tend to her own health and well-being. Her search to discover why people really get sick and what truly optimizes health outcomes launched a bestselling book, two television specials, and a revolution in the way we look at mind-body medicine. But so many questions remained for this doctor and skeptic. How is it that some people do everything right and stay sick, while others seem to do nothing extraordinary yet fully recover? How does faith healing work—or does it? What’s behind the phenomenon of spontaneous remission—and is this something we can influence? Can we make ourselves miracle-prone? Certain that, if she looked hard enough, she would find the answers, Dr. Rankin embarked on a decade-long journey to explore these questions and more. The result is Sacred Medicine, both a seeker’s travelogue and a discerning guide to the sometimes-perilous paths available to patients when wellness fads, lifestyle changes, and doctors have failed them. In Sacred Medicine, you’ll follow Dr. Rankin around the world to meet healers gifted and flawed, go on pilgrimage to sacred sites, investigate the science of healing, and learn how to stay safe when seeking a healer. You’ll receive the wisdom offered by Indigenous cultures for whom healing begins with our sacred connection to Mother Earth, and dive deep into the cutting-edge trauma research that is igniting a medical revolution. Rich with practices and protocols that Dr. Rankin has found particularly effective, Sacred Medicine delivers a thoughtful, grounded exploration of questions around how we heal—and a path of hope for those in need.
America's healthcare system in the twenty-first century faces a variety of pressures and challenges, not the least of which is that posed by the increasingly multicultural nature of American society itself. Large numbers among the Hmong, immigrants from the landlocked Asian nation of Laos, continue to prefer their own ancient medical traditions. That these Hmong Americans should continue to adhere to a tradition of folk medicine, rather than embrace the modern healthcare system of America, poses questions that must be answered. This book takes up the task of examining Hmong American concepts of health, illness and healing, and looks at the Hmong American experience with conventional medicine. In so doing, it identifies factors that either obstruct or enable healthcare delivery to the Hmong, specifically a target sample of Hmong Americans resident in Colorado. Drawing upon scientific methods of data collection, the research reveals attitudes currently held by a group of American citizens toward health and medicine which run the gamut from the very modern to those which have prevailed in the highlands of Southeast Asia for centuries.
With their ability to enter trances, to change into the bodies of other creatures, and to fly through the northern skies, shamans are the subject of both popular and scholarly fascination. In Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination Ronald Hutton looks at what is really known about both the shamans of Siberia and about others spread throughout the world. He traces the growth of knowledge of shamans in Imperial and Stalinist Russia, descibes local variations and different types of shamanism, and explores more recent western influences on its history and modern practice. This is a challenging book by one of the world's leading authorities on Paganism.
Americans have long been aware of the phenomenon loosely known as faith healing. Such practices most often received attention when they came into conflict with biomedical practice. During the 1990s, however, the American cultural landscape changed dramatically and religious healing became acommonplace feature of our society. The essays in this book chart this new reality. Insofar as healing traditions constitute the meeting ground or point of conflict between different groups, argue the authors, they provide a powerful lens through which to examine cultural changes at work. Each ofthe papers offers a particular case study. Many emphasize gender, race, ethnicity, and class as key components of healing experiences.