Patient Talk

HOW DO SICK People decide what kind of healing to seek? Anthropology major Douglas Johnston '93 went to Tibetan settlements in Dharamsala, northern India, for answers to a question at once specific to displaced Tibetans and applicable to patients worldwide. When did the Tibetans opt for their traditional medicine, and when did they seek the Western variety? The two systems are very different: Tibetan ideas about health focus on the balance between karma, emotions, and die physical body, while Western medicine is oriented toward disease and pharmacology. Yet Johnston found that ordinary Tibetans held no grand overarching theories about the merits of each of the medical systems available to them. Nor, despite medical anthropology's expectations, did patients regularly visit traditional healers before turning to Western physicians. Instead, reports Johnston, "People made their decisions on the basis of idiosyncratic bits of knowledge and a combination of others' experiences." How did Johnston discover that? He used the anthropological method: he talked with people.

And that, he says, will influence the way he himself practices medicine someday. "I'11 spend more time listening to my patients," says the future physician. Johnston plans to enter medical school after taking a year to work fulltime in the Guilford, Connecticut, iron-works forge he founded four years ago.