Abstract

VALLEJO SAMUDIO, ÁLVARO ROBERTO. INDIGENOUS MEDICINE AND MENTAL HEALTH. Act.Colom.Psicol. [online]. 2006, vol.9, n.2, pp.39-46. ISSN 0123-9155.

The different medical alternatives used today by humanity enrich the prophylaxis as well as the diagnoses and the treatment of diseases when these are tackled within a multicausal framework. In this paper two of these alternatives are considered: Western medicine and indigenous medicine. It focuses on the concept of health developed by these two approaches, emphasizes the need to reassess indigenous medicine, and examines in general how mental health disorders are regarded from the point of view of indigenous medicine. The author stresses that in order to understand this conception it is necessary to get acquainted with the cosmogony and cosmology characteristics of indigenous people.

Keywords : Indigenous medicine; Western medicine; mental health.

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