Culture and its Influence on Clinical Practice

20 minutes  

Our understanding of medicine is governed by the culture in which we live. The tools of medicine—case history, examination, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics—remain the same whether we live in the Amazon or New York. However, how we use these tools, and how our patients understand their illness, is a product of culture and environment. “Soul fright” and the need for “soul retrieval” will be a foreign concept to a patient and healing practitioner immersed in the biomedical paradigm but not so to an immigrant from a country where such a belief is part of their culture.

Western biomedicine is unique in its technological prowess but is extremely limited in its underlying philosophical concepts which have originated in the philosophy of Descartes and Bacon. In this lecture, I will explore how the ideas that inform biomedicine also inform herbal medicine and this is to its detriment as we move forward in these uncertain times.