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Providing answers to the complex health questions facing today's society requires an integrated approach that melds multiple disciplines.
Modern medicine, considered by many to be the foundation for the allied health professions, is rooted in ancient traditions of healing. Indeed, some aspects of those traditions are relevant and complementary to modern medical practice. The allied health professions are included in the ancient traditions of the healing arts. This is an important point because the general populace has shown deep reverence for the esoteric and special skills for healers of all types since the early dawn of humanity. Contemporary society continues to revere the health worker, including the allied health professional. While there has always been a central figure who ministered to the physical, mental, spiritual and social conditions of people, such as the medicine man of shamanistic folk tradition, the physician in primitive society was physician, priest, magician, and philosopher in one person. In addition, other healing types were concerned with what was perceived to be the spiritual and emotional causation of illness. In the ancient world, it was commonly accepted that a function of religion was to heal disease. Magicians and others were called upon to handle the mystical dimensions of life, e.g. ancestral spirits, evil spirits and witchcraft. They were traditional folk healers who were familiar with the mental and psychological needs of individuals and communities. Such health provider could, in a real sense, be construed as a community working within the community. As such, each provider played a defined role within a system of community service that addressed the needs of the whole person.
Thus, to fully appreciate and understand the evolution of allied health professions one must study the evolution of the healing arts with the context of society while recognizing that the allied health sciences have always been an essential partner in the delivery of health and mental health services around the world.
The Changing Medical Paradigm
The medical paradigm has undergone considerable change since its early beginnings. The most significant of these has been the manner in which the health care profession, especially in the Western approach to medicine, viewed the patient and ultimately organized the delivery system to respond to patient needs.
The Early Approach to Medicine
The early formative stages of medicine evolved around the concept of holistic health. Ancient medicine integrated mind-body medicine and was rooted in a social and religious matrix of a culturally defined people within a definite belief system. Most societies had their shamans, magicians, and witch doctors who possessed psychological influence over individuals and the communal health belief system. Family and community were the basis for social healing. On the other hand, many cases of illness never reached a physician or professed healer. Such maladies were often treated by the sick person or by relatives. Early communities were organized according to tribal traditions of protection, social support, pooling of resources, expertise and family. Each community had its elders (healers), but more important, they had village social organizers who ensured that rituals and cultural events ministered to the social health of the community. Each of these, and other approaches, were the focus of early practice of individual and community health.
While the aforementioned approaches were not necessarily integrative or cross-disciplinary in approach, nonetheless, the health services consumer was insulated by a complex web of alternative and complementary services bound by a culturally defined community belief system. In addition to the physician, this complement included, but was not limited to, folk healers, magicians, masters of the occult sciences, pharmacists, druggists, psychologists, neighborhood activists, and religious leaders, each of whom offered their services to the ill.
The concept of a culturally defined belief system is rooted in a number of traditional health systems. For instance, traditional healers in southern Africa treat illnesses mainly with plant products and some animal products and use spiritual resources to augment the healing process. In the system, the traditional healer is concerned with relieving suffering, controlling symptoms and restoring physical functioning, and social and psychological connection. In Asia, traditional Chinese medicine is a healing art that includes both acupuncture and herbology as major components of therapy. Other dimensions of traditional Chinese therapy include exercise and nutrition. Both are concrete examples of the healing arts ministering to the health of the whole person within a culturally defined system.
Toward a Modern (Western) Approach to Medicine
Over the years, Western concepts of medicine, which "rest on the axiom of Cartesian dualism or the separation of mind and body," have evolved and wholly displaced the ancient view. Only recently have we returned to the concept that health is a function of the physical, spiritual, mental, and social aspects of life. However, to minister to the physiological, psychological, social, and spiritual aspect of a person and/or community at the same time is an extremely difficult and time-consuming task. Through a process of professionalism, reductionism, and specialization, twentieth-century Western medicine evolved into a fragmented system of health care that distinguishes physical health from the mental, social, and spiritual aspects of health. In this paradigm, allied health personnel emerged as one of a number of individual support and complementary healers in a specialized and compartmentalized health care system. This is the tacit operational model for the allied health profession.
Excerpt from: Allied Health: Practice Issues and Trends in the New Millennium
Pedro J. Lecca, PhD Peggy A. Valentine EdD Kevin J. Lyons PhD
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