Healing

The set of relational practices that lead to the restoration of a person's physical, social, and spiritual body to good health, typically by alleviating or curing pain, illness, or disease (or some combination of these), is called healing. Ending estrangement, whether the body's from its good health or the individual's from society, is a healing act. For society as a whole, healing is linked to educative processes that increase empathy for those who suffer. The practical, philosophical, cultural, historical, and spiritual components of healing are interconnected realities, yoked to the empowerment of the individual or corporate patient. The most effective healers massage these connections.

The patient's identity plays a key role in many kinds of personal, communal, and national healing. Good healers operate in harmony with, rather than antagonistically toward, the patient's overall worldview, which can vary dramatically depending on the patient's identity.

Healers broker the relationship between nature and culture. Across cultures, their most common act is healing by touching, sometimes called the laying on of hands. As managers of the healing process (in the sense that they are directing it and the patient is taking direction), healers ritualistically manipulate the moral and cultural world in order to comprehensively address the patient, who is at once a physical and symbolic being. Healers are powerful only when patients trust them; this trust is also capable of bringing healing to the healer. Psychologist Lane Gerber's 1990 study of surgeons [Page 585]whose treatment efforts are not successful finds that when patients trust the doctor again, or forgive the doctor, the physician increases capacities to be successful with future patients and to heal personal wounds resulting from patient non-recovery.

The fact that shamans have survived into the present day is evidence that people trust them, as they trust the local physician. Physician-centered medicine claims to be universal: Doctors believe that immunizations and antibiotics will generally work for everyone, regardless of their spiritual state or country of origin. Shamanism, by contrast, is not detachable from its local context. Its success is rooted in its focus on the specific preconditions of illness—which are determined by the context that is shaped by history and social and psychological life. The affliction itself may not be directly treated. For example, in Korea the majority of shamans are women whose clients are housewives and whose most effective techniques revolve around role-playing and ecstatic visions. By balancing chemical compounds and emotional states, euphoria's production of endorphins (opiate-like compounds) in the brain provides therapeutic treatment of the root causes of illnesses located in the social world that shapes women's lives. The shaman's treatment is individualized. Is the shaman aware of the neurophysiological activity that she induces? Probably not in the scientific sense, but certainly in the visual evidence of a revived patient. Once persecuted by the government, shamanism is now protected as a preserver of Korean culture. The production of culture is largely women's work. The social, political, and economic foundation of Korean shamanism was linked to the shaman's ability to alleviate the suffering of housewives who attended to all the many details involved in producing a culture. It remains to be seen if neo-shamanism will find an anchor in contemporary women's acculturation to urban lifestyles and urban physician care.

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