Health Care and Complementary Medicine among Peruvian Immigrants Settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

The authors focus on strategies of therapeutic complementariness carried out by Peruvian immigrants settled in Buenos Aires, articulating the incidence of the following factors: cultural identity, socioeconomic status, religious identity, and styles of thinking. Firstly, they describe the available medicines, classifying them in: a) biomedicine and official psychotherapies, b) traditional medicine (curanderismo or folk healing), c) religious therapy or medicine (Church offerings that Weber called “institutionalized”), d) alternative medicine (these are non-traditional in Ibero-America and were spread in the lasts decades, in many cases linked to new age phenomena), and e) lay-treatments. Secondly, they outline the main styles of thinking evident in the social actors’ therapeutic strategies, stressing two main groups according to people's religious identity: Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal. Two main style of thinking are identified among non-Pentecostals: individuals who utilize only “natural medicine” and physiotherapy among many alternative offerings, and individuals who also partake in alternative medicine rooted in Oriental cultures, such as yoga, Buddhist therapy, and art-therapy. Finally, they describe and analyze a concrete pathway of healing, taking into the account the motifs and significance of the health searches, stressing the social actor's point of view.