| In addition to conventional, Western medicine, there are a great number and variety of systems of health belief and practice active in the United States today. Contrary to popular and academic stereotypes of marginality, non-conventional health belief systems are found among people of every ethnicity, religious persuasion, social class, and level of educational attainment. Far from dying out in the face of advances in scientific medicine, many vernacular health belief systems are growing in popularity. Included among these are both longstanding traditional systems (often referred to as "folk medicine") and newer developments and syncretisms such as the many approaches grouped together under the rubrics of Holistic Health or New Age healing (sometimes referred to as "popular medicine"). While a small number of vernacular healing systems are used to the virtual exclusion of conventional medicine, this pattern is the exception, rather than the rule. Far more often, both conventional and vernacular health care modalities are used, either sequentially or simultaneously.;This work addresses vernacular health belief systems, exploring the ways in which people define health and illness; how and why people believe they become sick; how they decide what to do about it; and under whose care they decide to undertake particular therapeutic measures. Fieldwork including direct interviewing, inter-system mediation, and participant-observation provides the bulk of the data. A pair of contrast studies examines vernacular health care beliefs and practices in both an ethnic minority and a "mainstream" population, one person's illness and a widespread epidemic. One study describes the course of negotiations between conventional medicine and a young Hmong man with chronic liver disease; the other looks at the tremendous range of vernacular responses to AIDS in the mostly white, middle-class gay PWA community. For purposes of comparative discussion all health belief systems, including conventional medicine, are treated as being culturally constructed. It is proposed that this perspective makes it possible to negotiate among divergent health belief systems. The meeting of conventional and vernacular health beliefs and practices, which conjointly comprise contemporary American health behavior, is endorsed as fertile ground for applied Folklore studies. |
