Alternative medicine: Soul healers

Abstract

The wars and subsequent crisis in the former Yugoslavia have brought about a different, distressed value system to the populations in Serbia. One of its reflections is seen in an establishment of the so-called alternative healing systems. The contemporary, modern medicine holds that illnesses are caused by various psycho-somatic agents, therefore, I take contemporary healers to be alternative psychiatrists and therapists which balance and cure individual distresses. Crisis in societies are psycho-physical triggers that initiate structural disturbances in personalities of active and passive participants, and initiate a search for psycho-therapeutic methods which include transcendental. The processes of globalization and urbanization have helped clear up the fact that the official/established and alternative/traditional medicines have structural determination and corresponding status with the prevailing value system and religious affiliation of the population. Cultural-historic processes are often established in the alternative, and the opposite.

Keywords

• traditional culture
• globalization
• social crisis
• magical practice
• healers
• alternative psychiatry