Issues of Health in Guatemala

I also found the readings this week to incredibly interesting and also beneficial for our class in helping us understand a little more about the aspects of health in Guatemala. In the “Someone is Making you Sick” article I was really fascinated by the amount of outside blame that is placed on illness. It seems the Mayans have a way of always finding an outside cause whether it be nature or even another person/witch. Never was there any mention of personal blame. In the United States this is a well-known aspect of disease. If a person has smoked their entire life and develops lung cancer or a person develops heart problems due to poor eating habits, it is clear that some blame will be placed on the individual for their lifestyle choices. In Guatemala it seems that a person’s only control of his or her on health is through maintaining health social relationships. Illness is much less a biological and scientific aspect of a person’s health, it is instead a punishment brought on by inappropriate social conduct. This leads into the differences seen in the Protestant and Catholic religions. Even thought the Protestants renounced the idea of witchcraft as a mean for getting sick, it seems they just replaced this idea with Satan. So instead of being punished by another person in society an individual will be punished by a supernatural force Satan, thus getting rid of some of the social regulation. In general as a person going into the medical field I found it very hard to read about the certain ways the Mayans go about curing disease. For instance when dealing with fallen crown in an adult, they push the roof of the mouth until the condition is corrected. Reading about all these different practices I struggled with the notion that Western medicine isn’t the only way to fix health problems. However, I had to realize it’s a completely different culture that finds a deep religious connection in disease and though I am very skeptical it is hard for anyone to deny that some of their practices do in fact work even if there seems to be a much more simple remedy provided by Western medicine.

In the “Your Destiny is to Care for Pregnant Women” article I was reminded of our classes visit with Manuel’s wife and the details she told us about midwifes and the relationships she had with them during her numerous pregnancy. Much of the information presented in this article seemed to be exactly like what she told us, however, I feel the article stressed a much more spiritual side to midwifery that was not presented in class. As this article addressed, destiny is what decides who should or should not be a midwife. This idea of destiny playing such a big role ties back into the religious and spiritual aspect of health that the Mayans believe so strongly in. The other interesting part of this article was the conflict between the midwives and the hospital. I found myself really wondering which has more benefits, a midwife or the hospital? Although the hospital provides better health care in the delivery of the baby, it does not provide the comfort that a midwife brings and it is hard to say which aspect is more important in the birthing process. The education of the midwives is an issue that can be seen as a great example of development problems we have been discussing this semester. The issue with being able to even educate the midwives provides a big standstill in ever truly developing the midwifery program in Guatemala. Most women are illiterate or speak various dialects so it is very hard to provide a unified system of education that would benefit in the development of midwifery.