Week 2- Marisa Gee

With an increasingly modernized and globalized society, it seems that shamanism and spiritual as well as traditional healing may soon become obsolete. However, La Por’s story and commentary about her experiences as a shaman are counteracting the seemingly faded practices of spirit healers and shamans. While she acknowledges that the majority of her patients are elderly, she also states that more and more people like herself have heard the calling at young ages. I also found it very interesting that shamans were able to work alongside western trained doctors in at least one hospital in California. I think this is very important as the belief system of a patient can be an integral part to their healing and allowing that to be combined with the advances of modern medicine will no doubt give a person the best odds.

Kim’s article concerning Korean shamanism was also interesting in that she too mentioned the role of shamanism alongside hospitals. For Kim though, she saw a strict divide between the two but she did say that traditional healing (typically in the form of herbal medicines, etc) was used often with formal health care. One of the more important realizations Kim draws reinforces the idea that Por touched on, that belief plays a strong role in the healing powers of shamanism.

These two articles reminded me of a study that was introduced to me in my exercise biology class (the graph of the study I’ve included as my visual). The background is that in Chinese and Japanese the word death and the number four are very similar sounding. Hospital records showed that while white counterparts in the ICU had similar rates of dying across all days of the month [top left graph], Asian patients experienced a significant increase in death rates on the fourth day of the month [bottom right graph]. It seems that the belief that these patients had in the number four being closely related to death actually had an impact on their survival outcomes, a testament to the strength of beliefs. While this study doesn’t explicitly go into depth about shamanism or spiritual healing, my question would be if these patients were able to have more spiritual support during their time in the ICU (which is strictly monitored in terms of who can enter) would this spike in deaths on the fourth day continue?

References

Txawb- California Asian Directory. “The Pa Lor Story- The Journey Between Two Worlds.”

Chongho Kim. “Korean Shamanism: The Cultural Paradox.”

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Professor Shaffrath EXB 117 Lecture