Medical Care and Advisers

Choosing among this variety of kinds of care is, unavoidably, on the basis of the organized understandings the individual has. Despite limited sharing of cultural elements, neither the understandings nor their organization is completely idiosyncratic. Table 14B shows that the original decision to visit either an herbal doctor or a hospital doctor was usually the result of advice rather than direct guidance by personally held understandings. Of the thirty-two who have visited herbal doctors, only two report that they did so on the basis of their own knowledge of what was wrong with them and what sort of practitioner was likeliest to be able to deal with the problem.

A substantially larger number of patients decided to visit a hospital doctor on the basis of their own understandings of what to do for their illness, but it is still only six out of the forty in the sample. Again, the largest part, around eighty percent, made the decision to seek this type of care on the basis of advice received.