The Fasting Family : Experiences of health, responsibility and healing in a Japanese medical clinic

Abstract

Based on a fieldwork with a six month long duration this thesis explores how the concepts of responsibility and health relate to one another in the plural medical landscape of Japan. In a traditional clinic situated in a small city, the patients have chosen a somewhat different approach to healing than that of the conventional cosmopolitan approach of biomedicine. What this thesis explores, is in what ways an alternative approach to health and healing affects individual bodies, how these bodies experience themselves in between the alternative and the conventional, and how different experiences of body and healing can alter individual lifeworlds. Through a phenomenological methodological approach to experiences of healing, this thesis argues that healing can be understood as an experience of wholeness. Not only a traditional wholeness in the sense of a holistic approach to the oneness of mind and body, but that a sense of wholeness also can be created out of a felt unity with society, nature and world. The patients emotional and moral attachment to their peers, their national historical heritage, and concepts of Japanese nature will be explored as part of the healing experience. This is because the therapies performed at the clinic explicitly draws on several strong national symbols such as these to achieve healing. In a modern society where chronic and psychosomatic illness is growing, the medicine of Nishi Shiki has shown to be an interesting alternative to cosmopolitan popular biomedicine. The Nishi Shiki clinic has proved to give insight into what affects the individual patients choices when several medical approaches are available.