How Effective is Shamanic Healing?

Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria)

From my grandmother’s care and the work of Don Andrés and Doña Talín, I’ve seen firsthand the effectiveness of shamanic healing. Part of their success was due to knowledge of herbs and other plants, but something else was also involved. Shamanic healing uses the power of a patient’s faith in the healer and the healing process. Like all healers, shamans employ hope, suggestion, expectation, and rituals that elicit a powerful placebo effect. This effect, which has been called “the doctor who resides within,” arises from a direct connection between positive emotions and the biochemistry of the body. By reestablishing emotional and spiritual equilibrium a shaman strengthens the self-healing abilities of a patient.

Research has shown that the use of songs, chants, prayers, spells, and music produce emotional states in a patient that affect the way the immune system responds to illness. Within ceremonial performances song and dance intertwine the sensory realms of color, odor, motion, and touch so as to shift participants from illness toward health. Shamans use metaphors—ways of thinking about one thing in terms of another—to describe a mythic world and to help the patient manipulate sensory, emotional, and cognitive information in a way that alters his or her perception of illness. Healers ritually enact their local system of myths and symbols and interpret the patient’s condition within that system.

As for the psychological dimension of shamans’ work, the repetitive symbolism of their chants, and, in a number of traditions, the use of drums, gongs, bamboo tubes, or rattles helps restore a sense of order that replaces the chaos of illness. In many cultures shamans call up energy from the depths, creating a magical soundscape that awakens and unites. In this environment there’s a release of unconscious feelings, in part through a transfer of negative emotions to the healer. Confession and forgiveness, which are central activities in shamanic healing, also elicit repressed memories that resolve conflicts. When Dennis and I worked at healing the paralyzed man as part of our initiation “test,” we could see these forces at work. In general, shamans reestablish harmonious interpersonal relations, providing an emotional catharsis, or the remembering and re-experiencing of painful memories. It has been scientifically demonstrated that shamans who encourage their clients to publicly perform their dreams in poetry, song, and dance are 80 percent effective in healing. Psychiatrists, who use psychoanalytic techniques that encourage their clients to talk about, draw, paint, or describe their dreams in private, are only 30 percent effective.

(continue with The Performance of Healing)