Doctors and Healers
eBook - ePub

Doctors and Healers

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Doctors and Healers

About this book

We think we know what healers do: they build on patients' irrational beliefs and treat them in a 'symbolic' way. If they get results, it's thanks to their capacity to listen, rather than any influence on a clinical level. At the same time, we also think we know what modern medicine is: a highly technical and rational process, but one that scarcely listens to patients at all. In this book, ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading. They show instead that healers are interesting precisely because they don't listen to patients, using techniques of 'divination' rather than 'diagnosis'. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment. Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.

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Yes, you can access Doctors and Healers by Tobie Nathan,Isabelle Stengers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Philosophy & Ethics in Science. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Copyright
  3. Editor’s Note
  4. 1 Towards a Scientific Psychopathology
  5. 2 The Doctor and the Charlatan
  6. 3 Users: Lobbies or Political Creativity?
  7. 4 Doctors, Healers, Therapists, the Sick, Patients, Subjects, Users . . .
  8. End User License Agreement