Case study: "traditional medicine in care for the effects of gender violence in ñhañhu women and girls"

Abstract

Despite the dominant role of institutional medicine, in indigenous communities, a diversity of therapeutic knowledge coexists among the population; sometimes it is domestic knowledge but most of it is transmitted by community therapists, mainly women recognized as traditional healers or doctors.Although, it has been thought that knowledge related to traditional medicine was mostly focused, in the case of women, to attend reproductive events that involved the need for certain care from pregnancy to the puerperium, social reality has demonstrated that this system has had to respond to a demand: to attend the effects produced by violence.It is an approach to the situation of indigenous women with regard to their access to health as a right, to make visible alternatives to address the effects of violence in their physical, emotional and spiritual state. Here are shown threads that lead to other, non-institutional forms, that are for women, possibilities to recover well-being. Also, it is shared the path taken to show the existence of a system of care with a view to influencing politically, systematizing the experience that can define a model of health care culturally relevant for ñhañhu women.This research contributes to the recognition of traditional medicine as a viable alternative for the care and attention of the community, especially around the effects of gender violence