Question

The book, "The Spirit Catches You…" describes a number of traditional techniques that members of the Hmong community use to treat maladies. Choose two techniques mentioned in the book. Answer the following questions:

1) What are the basic elements of the technique (how is it practiced?).

2) How do Hmong believe that it treats maladies?

3) Do you believe that it is a useful practice? Or do you believe that Hmong would be just as well without it? In answering this last question, be careful to define your criteria for "useful" or "not useful."

4) Based on your criteria for whether the practice is useful or not, what kind of evidence would help you bolster your claim?

Answer 1

ANSWER 1 :-

1. The different traditional techniques which are used by the Hmong people in treatment include spiritual rituals as well as utilization of herbs and plant associated medicines.
2. These people have their own ethics and culture which clearly defines them to be constant with their techniques of curing a condition which is totally related to the spiritual part as compared to the medicines which includes the scientific way of dealing with a condition.
3. According to the Hmong people, diseases are basically an output of an affected internal soul and hence spiritual healing is used to replenish and regenerate the soul which is being taken over by the disease.
4. These people mainly deal with the use of medicines produced exclusively from the medicinal plants and herbs which have the natural healing properties.

ANSWER 2 :-

1. Natural medicines basically in the form of herbs and medicinal plants are used to tackle a disease condition although there is no specific background information with them regarding any malady. This indicates their experience in treating a particular situation and they solely rely on the process of rejuvenating the soul within the body by means of performing the rituals so as to cure the conditions.
2. The main technique that should be included is the utilization of the heat component. They prefer eating hot food and solutions during a disease and this in turn is the belief behind the destruction of the phase that is associated with the blocking of the spiritual form of the body from healing.
3. There are various aspects that they consider to be practically and scientifically unsound but still considered on the fact of the evident cultural system these people follow.

ANSWER 3 :-

1. In my opinion, both the medicinal approach and the spiritual approach are at their ends better. This depends upon the mentality in which a topic is subjected to. Nobody has ever been able to construct a cell or to make a cell functionally work, there are many diseases such as the AIDS for which no vaccination or treatments are available and at the same time spiritual methods of treating the diseases may be associated with either a placebo effect or may fail to show improvements in health.
2. Even during scientific experiments, controls are basically provided in the form of drugs that have no effects (placebo trials) and have shown these effects to be better as compared to the medicine associated approaches. So, taking into consideration this point, if this method is being accompanied with a medicinal approach, the results would be quite unexpected.
3. There are chances that the systems may fail to co-operate in some cases and sometimes proves effective. People do believe in supernatural positive forces but its hard to prove their existence but in case of these therapies, there is a positive modulation of the mindset of the people which drives their recovery as compared to a patient in hospitals who cannot be completely assured whether there is any chances of survival or not because. In terms of the positive mindset of getting healed, chances of recovery should tend to improve in terms of the techniques followed by the Hmong people even though they may not have any effect in real.