cooling mudpacks: the aesthetic quality of therapy 167
are considered.^5 In addition, some people undergo psychotherapy as an ongoing
process of self exploration and development rather than simply to cure or over-
come a problem. Still, some researchers in biomedicine have recently ques-
tioned the emphasis on curing and would like to see palliative care extended
to a wider variety of problems, not only illnesses that are deemed incurable.
Th ey critique an emphasis on cure that obscures other goals of treatment and
consideration of how painful it is to undergo a course of therapy.^6
Medical historians Jecker and Self (1991) suggest that in the past greater
attention was paid to care and palliation which changed with biomedicine’s
attempts to gain prestige and develop as a profession. A division between care
and cure resulted in part from competition with homeopathic healers and lay
people, often relatives, who nursed–that is, took care of—the ill, which was
considered women’s work and devalued. Jecker and Self conclude:
Th e early history of American medicine suggests a possible explanation for the
association of medicine with cure, rather than care. Th e presence of fi erce com-
petition and marginal status during its early years forged a mission for medicine
that focused on achieving cultural authority and an elite status for its practition-
ers. Eff orts to gain authority and status required physicians to stand apart from
laypersons and develop exclusive modes of language, technique and theory. Th is
put physicians at odds with activities, such as patient empathy and care, that call
upon abilities of engagement and identifi cation with others (293).I would add that the issues Jecker and Self discuss are more acute when
the dis-ease involves a psychological and emotional pathology. While people
are normally willing to endure unpleasant and curatively-oriented procedures
for problems that are more acute and more fi rmly rooted in the body—and
this includes people in India (Van Hollen 2003)—treatment that involves aes-
thetic discomfort and pain is more problematic when the mind, emotion or
self are affl icted.
Reactions to Ayurveda and Allopathy
In Chapter 1, Ajit, the young man who was undergoing therapy with an
ayurvedic psychiatrist and had formerly been treated by allopathic psychiatrists,
introduced us to some of the diff erences, as he saw them, between allopathic
and ayurvedic psychiatric treatments:
I came to [name of allopathic hospital], took “injection”s and was given a
new medicine. Later I was forced to stop it. Th e reason was that I had started