natural medicine...working through my bias

I was not given a ton of instructions or guidelines about what this blog had to consist of to obtain credit for my international family medicine rotation, but at one point I was told to “reflect/process”, not just record what happens to me here.

This post is an attempt to process the things that I have seen related to healthcare that are quite different from western medicine.

In Peru there is a type of Tea for every single specific medical ailment. Take chamomile tea for upset stomach. Take black licorice tea for headaches. Take coca tea for altitude sickness and for digestion problems. Take lime tea for heart problems. Take peach tea for kidney problems. (Take a combination of 5 different teas to help with sleeping issues). It’s not that I dislike the emphasis on tea…I find it tasty and warm and soothing when I have a sore throat. But, my western-medicine brain finds it very hard for tea to solve these problems on a physiological level. How is lime-flavored tea going to reverse the pain of angina? How is peach tea going to treat a kidney stone? In the end, it seems semi-harmless to address all of these problems with teas, but what if drinking tea means someone stops taking their blood pressure medicines and their kidney failure worsens? Not so harm-less in that case.

Along the same lines, but a bit more absurd to me is the conversations I have had about “the herb de cancer”. Supposedly, if you have been diagnosed with cancer, you can use an herb (eat it or drink it in tea) and your cancer goes away. One time I was told a story about somebody’s aunt. She had been told she had metastatic breast cancer and only had 6 months to live. She refused surgery and chemotherapy and only drank the “herb de cancer” tea 3 times a day. And now she is still alive, 20 years later.

Great story, and I hope it’s true, but I highly doubt it. I’d like to see a control study where people with cancer drink “herb de cancer” tea and others drink black teas and a few years later we see whose still living 10 years later.

Now I know this makes me sound arrogant, quickly trashing these herbal and tea-based treatments because they are not scientifically proven. I know that there are many things that natural medicine remedies treat quite well, but in a society that relies so heavily on this approach to serious diseases, it’s hard not to be suspicious and concerned. This internal struggle I’ve had while witnessing a heavier reliance on natural approaches than I’ve seen in the US has reminded me of an amazing book I have read twice: “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”. It is a very enlightening book that deals with a lot of the flaws that a western medicine approach has when it comes to treating patients that come from a vastly different cultural background.

At the end of the book, the author consults a Harvard Anthropologist about what he might have suggested the doctor do, to avoid the myriad of frustrations that developed....

Kleinman’s Eight Questions for Cultural Assessment 

1. What do you call your illness? What name does it have? 

2. What do you think caused your illness? 

3. Why and when did it start? 

4. What do you think the illness does? How does it work? 

5. How severe is it? Will it have a short or long course? 

6. What kind of treatment do you think the patients should receive? What are the 

most important results you hope the patient receives from this treatment? 

7. What are the chief problems the illness has caused? 

8. What do you fear most about the illness? 

These questions have been a good source of guidance for me...

The bottom line is this, there will always be things that I feel comfortable saying are right and wrong, regardless of how culturally sensitive I strive to be. 1) rubbing fecal matter on a wound is not a good idea. 2) bathing in urine doesn't do much 3) herb de cancer isnt all its cracked up to be (the secret would have gotten out by now) 4) depression is a real illness 5) child abuse (physical and sexual) is evil