The more I read about folk medicine the more angry I am with how modern day health care trains doctors to interact with patients. There are multiple words in different cultures that all at once address the mental, physical and spiritual distress being experienced by an individual. Words that can only be understood from the view point, and lived experience, of someone who was raised in that culture...but most modern medicine is not equipped to handle these kind of cultural concepts of "illness" and therefore at best tries to place them into categories they don't fit in or, at worst, outright disregards them as backwards; thus completely invalidating both the patient's distress and culture in the process.
In essence, the experience of illness is informed by culture.
In essence, poets have understood for centuries what modern medicine cannot.
We all sit and talk about the beauty of language and culture and how the word for 'love' does not have the same root, or direct meaning from one nation to another- and yet, we expect the world to have the same understanding of "pain"?
