Person-centered traditional medicine

Heise T.; Villar-Lopez M.; Salaverry O. · Person Centered Medicine (2023) · DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-17650-0_40

Resumen

Every culture has its own traditional medicine, as healing diseases is necessary for mankind since ever and has developped consequently everywhere. But as cultures vary so do their approaches to healing. As cultures are time bound, so the ideas about illness, diagnosis and therapy change and this is also true for our contemporary "scientific" medical point of view. Here we show several traditional medicines with a special focus on the traditional Chinese medicine, but also to medical ideas from other continents and compare them with the idea of a person-centered medicine in contrast to a technicalized and standardized modern medicine. We will see that traditional medicines share as a common trait the individuality in their procedure, being all person-centered medicines. Being modest and combine the best in the efforts of healing, would fit us the most and avoid overjudging our socalled modern progress, which will never be the point of view of the day after tomorrow. The term person-centered medicine appears modernly in Western culture as a result of an ethical, philosophical and scientific reflection on the nature of health as experienced by persons, and therefore on the nature of the discipline. Person-centered medicine is practiced by human beings, is aimed at human beings and is not possible without the involvement of human beings. The medical systems that we group under the common name of traditional medicines show us numerous examples, individual and systematic, of the same comprehensive and integral approach to the person. Some of these traditional medical systems are still in full force, such as traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, Sunni medicine, and others; but from other medical systems we only preserve the remains of their time of splendor, which nevertheless are sufficient to identify the holistic character that characterized them, and that they still maintain in their contemporary versions. We will show how traditional medicines integrate the health-disease process with the psychic, the spiritual, and in many cases the family and community with the cosmic environment as fundamental aspects for medicine. The articulation of such fundamental dimensions in integrated concepts of health may be recognized in early Andean cosmovisions and more recent golden pyramid of healing perspectives. The question thus arises, if the age old traditional medicine, which existed and developped since Neanderthal times, may suggest a blueprint for person-centered medicine. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

Instituciones: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos