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

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.

Nature Cure and Non-Communicable Diseases: Ecological Therapy as Health Care in India.

With rapidly increasing rates of non-communicable diseases, India is experiencing a dramatic public health crisis that is closely linked to changing lifestyles and the growth of the middle-class. In this essay we discuss how the practice of Nature Cure provides a way of understanding the scale and scope of the crisis, as it is embodied, and a way to understand key elements of a solution to problems that the crisis presents for institutionalized health care. As institutionalized in contemporary India, Nature Cure involves treatment and managed care using earth, air, sunlight, and water as well as a strict dietary regimen. In this regard, the essay shows how Nature Cure's bio-ecological orientation toward public health, which is grounded in the history of its modern incorporation into India, provides an expansionist, ecological model for holistic care that counters the reductionist logic of bio-medical pharmaceuticalization.

Rethinking the history of medicine in Asia: Hakim Mohammed Said and the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine.

In 1963 Hakim Mohammed Said took a Pakistani delegation from the Society for the Promotion of Eastern Medicine on a monthlong trip to China to meet with and learn from practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine. This essay focuses on Said's interpretation of the history of medicine in Asia, which was inspired by his trip and informed by a broad, global understanding of how Unani medicine developed from the eighth century to the present. Said's advocacy of Eastern Medicine provides a way to think about the history of medicine and medical revitalization that is not limited by colonial, postcolonial, or nationalist assumptions and priorities.