John Dominic Crossan writes of cross-cultural investigations of indigenous healing in medical anthropology distinguish between disease and illness.
[ul]Disease as any primary malfunctioning in biological and pyschological processes
Illness as the secondary psychosocial and cultural responses to disease (how the patient the patient’s family and social network react to the patient’s disease)[/ul]
Ideally clinical care should treat both disease and illness.
Modern health professionals tend to treat disease not illness.
Indigenous systems of healing tend to treat illness not disease.
Arthur Kleinman and Lilias Sung’s research showed that in most cases indigenous practitioners must heal because they primarily treat three types of disorders:
[ul]acute self-limiting (naturally remitting) diseases
non-life threatening chronic diseases win which management of the illness is a larger component of clinical management than biomedical treatment of the disease
secondary somatic manifestation (somatization) of minor psychological disorders and interpersonal problems[/ul]
The modern physician is trained to systematically ignore illness and Kleinman and Sung’s corollary argument would be that they must fail to heal.
Clinical work represents a profound distortion relying on the application of biomedical technology to control disease while foundering on the psychosocial and cultural treatment of illness.
In a recent survey of medical anthropology Allan Young enlarges the distinction around ‘unhealth’ into a triple one:
[ul]disease
illness
sickness[/ul]
Illness is how disease and sickness are brought into individual consciousness. Illness personalizes disease.
Sickness is the process through which worrisome behavioral and biological signs particularly ones originating in disease are given socially recognizable meanings. Sickness socializes illness and disease.
Peter Worsley sees unhealth taking place not within a biomechanistic framework which separates nature from the supernatural the social world from the world of nature and the physical individual from his or her social matrix but in an interdependence of all four.
Unhealth that is takes place in the interdependence of nature supernature society and person.
The personal familial local and psychosocial nature of unhealth provide opportunities for the success of healing activities in a very local region.