198 chapter
expected to cook elaborate meals and carry out household duties after a long
day of paid labor (38–46).
Not everyone is under the same time pressure, and this problem may vary
by social class and profession. However, several patients and families I spoke
to felt they could not aff ord to take the time to complete the 45-day treatment
at the Government Ayurveda Mental Hospital or spend the weeks that are
sometimes required to perform prayers and rituals at Chottanikkara temple.
As we saw at the end of the last chapter, even Ganga, the daughter of a family
of ayurvedic healers who holds ayurvedic therapy in high esteem, used allo-
pathic treatment because she felt it would provide fast relief. Th ese pressures,
however, primarily aff ect the more functional patients who are not severely
affl icted and have jobs or schooling to return to. Th ose individuals who are
chronically ill and spend years in and out of hospitals, or reside at religious
centers for extended periods, are unemployed or only occasionally employed
and can be a great strain on families’ time and resources.
Th ese dilemmas do not seem limited to India. Farquhar (1994) touches on
a similar issue in China, explaining that among Chinese urbanites who are
otherwise attracted to Chinese medicine, “Young families no longer have an
old grandmother handy to coordinate lots of elaborate cooking, and inten-
sifi ed work and study schedules leave little time to prepare and ‘slowly sip’
herbal decoctions” (476). Although people in these situations in China do not
lament the loss of the kind of pleasant healing process I observed, those who
use Chinese medicine do appreciate the thorough and aesthetically involved
orientation to health and “looking at illness,” to use Farquhar’s translation of
the Chinese term for what both doctor and patient do in the Chinese healing
encounter (482). Furthermore, as mentioned in the discussion of Farquhar’s
work in Chapter 1, doctors of Chinese medicine do not work simply to remove
symptoms, but rather, they aim for “a highly nuanced, positive, good health”
(482). Th ese are intriguing, but brief, incursions into these issues in the Chinese
medical environment.^2 More research on the correlation between speed, health,
aesthetics and work regimes in China and elsewhere would help us understand
how widespread these dilemmas are and the degree to which they are linked to
the introduction of biomedicine and changes in work regimens.
It is not only people suff ering mental affl ictions who have an opportunity
to compare psychiatric healing systems that make the association between
allopathic medicine and speed. Oxytocin drugs, which are in demand among
expectant women in Tamil Nadu, speed up the process of childbirth while
institutional constraints also lead doctors to use these medications to speed
up the queue in hospitals (Van Hollen 2003). Van Hollen suggests that in
crowded government hospitals in Chennai, where “rows upon rows of women