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Doing Health: Chinese and Other Perspectives. In ancient China, health was related to the individual person and their unique life. Both medical and philosophical texts testify to this: Maintaining vitality in the course of one’s own lifespan was a priority. Daily caring for one’s health revolved around Qi 氣 – a universal medium that is at the same time material and spiritual, emotional and neutral, unitary and diverse, as well as biological, psychological and physiological. Health thus becomes a verb, an act, a property to be preserved, a wavering and oscillating between pleasure and strength. Not least because of the pandemic, the demand for ‘traditional’ healing expertise rose worldwide. Against this background, early Chinese views on life are of unprecedented importance: From their perspective, a reorientation of public and global health policies seems inevitable.
The Āyurvedic Concept of Health. Āyurveda denominates the most important traditional medical system in South Asia. It looks back on an extensive corpus of literature from the past two thousand years. Since the 1980s, Āyurvedic medical practice has been increasingly spread outside South Asia. One reason for its success might be that Āyurveda places great emphasis on the maintenance of health, prevention, and regeneration. It also developed a broad and differentiated spectrum of diagnostic and therapeutic options, which, based on its own systematic paradigm, have been elaborated in detail over millennia. Āyurveda’s canonical texts not only provide systematic descriptions and definitions of the Āyurvedic understanding of health, they also contain detailed treatises regarding their relevance for everyday life and concrete medical instructions. This article provides basic information about the Āyurvedic understanding of health and contextualizes it within the everyday practice of both conventionally and Āyurvedically trained medical doctors in Germany.
Health in the Presence of the Ancestors: African Healers between Acceptance and Denial: A Case Study from South Africa. Health and well-being for all is the ambitious aim of the third of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN). The no less ambitious definition of health of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines that health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. While in biomedical contexts treatment concentrates on physical healing, in the South African context the idea of healing and well-being subsumes a combination of physical, mental and social treatment and includes the ancestors and medicinal plants as an important category in the healing process. The ancestors in particular are representatives of the social past that reaches into the present. Healing as such has a multifaceted dimension even beyond the definition of health as proposed by the WHO.