Cultural Views on Health

Healthcare is an important part of every culture across the world. Even though healthcare professional’s main goals are to treat illness, there is diversity amongst different cultures on how they chose to treat these illnesses. The following will explain the difference views of the Arabic culture and the Asian Indian culture.
Asian Indians traditional belief in healthcare is known as Ayurveda, which means “knowledge of life.”   This involves the treatment on fully relying on herbal remedies as the principal means of preventing and curing illnesses of a great percentage of India’s population. Their medicine is uses religion and secular which also involves the patient’s natural environment (Bhungalia, 2009).
Ayurvedic medicine is focused on prevention. It is a holistic medicine that is based on finding the root cause of the disease because they believe the cause is not always inside the body. All aspects are studied of the patient, such as the environment which can be a factor of why a person has a disease, before any medication can be prescribed. They highly believe it is more important to prevent the problem rather than looking for a cure. In order for a patient to be fully recovered, the origin of cause has to be removed.
Dosha is a part of the Ayruveda system that is used to comprise of three primary forces. The forces are called Vata, Pitta, and Kapha which represents characteristics derived from the five elements of space, air, fire, water and earth. The state of equilibrium between the dosha is perceived as a state of health and the state of balance is disease. This is the tool the physicians use to determine the position of the imbalance in the body and then is brought back to balance using different kinds of therapies (Bhungalia, 2009).

There are only the three doshas needed that fit every persons body types and each represents certain parts of the body which they believe all is needed to diagnose and heal the body. Vata is corresponded to... [continues]

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