Doctors and Healers by Tobie Nathan, Isabelle Stengers - 9781509521852

Doctors and HealersAuthor(s): Tobie Nathan, Isabelle Stengers\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd, United Kingdom\nImprint: Polity Press\nISBN-13: 9781509521852, 978-1509521852\nSynopsis\nWe think we know what healers do: they build on patients irrational beliefs and treat them in a symbolic way. If they get results, its 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 dont listen to patients, using techniques of divination rather than diagnosis. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in e.