56 CultureShock! Bolivia
question is not the availability of health care services but their
distribution. Barriers to distribution are primarily fi nancial,
but also geographic, linguistic and cultural.
Physicians still make house calls, and visitors staying
at a hotel have such service available. Foreign embassies
supply lists of approved English-speaking doctors for
their nationals.
In the absence of fi nancing for the wobbly state health
care system, many doctors do the best they can to plug the
gaps by doing volunteer work.
Most of the latest advances in medical technology are
available in Bolivia, though most Bolivians do not have access
to such technology.
Indigenous Bolivians will often seek the help of alternative
practitioners. In some cases, it is simply because Western
medicine is unaffordable. The language barrier is another
factor, as is a perceived lack of empathy from Spanish
speaking doctors. Folk doctors, curanderos and shamans
are available even in big cities. Traditional native remedies,
some travellers testify, have yielded successful results.
Some doctors are more flexible than others in their
willingness to incorporate native remedies into their
Westernised practice.Kallawayas
The most famous practitioners of native Bolivian medicine
are the Kallawayas. Found in the vast but little known
region north of La Paz, in and around towns such as Curva
(240 km / 149 miles north of La Paz), Charazani (218 km /
135 miles) and Pelechuco (318 km / 197 miles), the Kallawaya
are considered by some as a separate ethnic group with the
Puquina language, and by others as Aymara. Kallawayas
practice holistic medicine, seeking mind-body equilibrium.
Accomplished botanists and pharmacologists, they use as
many as 600 herbs in their practice.
Though women are not offi cially Kallawayas in the medical
sense, they participate in reproductive medicine and collect
herbs. The Kallawayas are concentrated in a remote region
and one would think that they would live an insular existence,