202 chapter
as patients and their families navigate and compare medical options bearing
in mind their concerns about suff ering, healing and aesthetic experience. In an
eff ort to improve approaches to health and healing, biomedical practitioners,
and really anyone who is concerned about health, should consider the critical
insights off ered by those in Kerala who have observed and compared diff erent
systems of healing and use these to improve their therapeutic techniques.
Although some in privileged cosmopolitan enclaves in less medically diverse
settings, such as the United States, do pursue health as constant improvement
through often expensive spa-like health centers and “alternative” healing and
health maintenance sessions and retreats, this orientation to health is consid-
ered a privilege and is not widely accessible. Th e problem for people in more
medically homogeneous societies lies in the lack of broadly available options
and the lack of diverse models for confi guring new approaches to health. Any
change in this situation would necessitate grand changes in people’s worklives
and the nature of our fast and stressful (post)modern society. And in the
United States, where even a right to basic biomedical health care has not yet
been realized, it is hard to imagine a broad-based promotion of “pleasurable”
alternatives and transcendent ideals of health. Th e practices of people and of
the state in Kerala, where wealth and material resources are far less plenti-
ful, though, demonstrate that “pleasant” healing options need not be confi ned
to those who can aff ord spas and high-end alternative medical treatments.
I noted earlier the irony that the panchakarma treatment (involving enemas,
nasally administered medicines and other procedures described in Chapter 2)
which is provided free to patients at Kerala’s Government Ayurveda Mental
Hospital is also available at signifi cant cost at ayurvedic health centers in New
England and New Mexico.
Such ayurvedic care need not be made available and aff ordable everywhere,
and it would be wrong to suggest that biomedicine should downplay the
importance of its many vital invasive procedures and life-saving drugs, even
if these do have unpleasant side eff ects. But, especially in the realm of mental
health, biomedical practitioners might use these insights into the pleasant-
ness of the healing process to enhance the aesthetic experience of biomedical
psychiatric treatment. Something akin to this has been achieved in the world
of obstetrics as observed in the most recent edition of Emily Martin’s now
classic critique of biomedical child-birthing practices, Th e Woman in the Body
(2001). Although undergoing childbirth may never be a pleasant process, some
hospitals give women multiple options for labor and delivery and create an
aesthetically engaging environment. A 2008 article in Th e Atlantic Monthly
reports links between better aesthetic design in hospital interiors and improved
patient health and—recalling patients in Kerala who left allopathic therapy to