Folk healer
A practitioner who treats illness through locally inherited remedies, rituals, or healing beliefs, outside or alongside formal medical systems.
Traditional medicine: Health knowledge and practices developed within cultural traditions and used to prevent or treat illness. Folk healers are practitioners within traditions that may include remedies, rituals, and diagnostic beliefs.
Traditional Chinese medicine: A medical tradition from China that includes practices such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, and dietary therapy. Some folk healers draw on practices that have also been formalized within this broad tradition.
Curandero: A practitioner of curanderismo, a healing tradition found in Latin American and Latino communities. The curandero is a specific folk-healer role combining local remedies and spiritual care.
Pharmacognosy: The study of medicines derived from natural sources, especially plants, fungi, and microorganisms. It offers methods for investigating active substances in folk remedies.
Medical anthropology: The study of health, illness, and medicine as shaped by culture, society, politics, and history. It examines how folk healing fits into wider social and medical systems.
Ethnomedicine: The study of how cultures understand health, illness, and healing practices. It examines the local systems of knowledge that shape a folk healer’s work.
Ayurveda: A South Asian medical tradition emphasizing diet, remedies, routines, and theories of bodily balance. Its locally adapted practitioners and remedies illustrate the range of traditional healing systems.
Traditional birth attendant: A community-based practitioner who assists childbirth using locally established knowledge and practices. Birth attendants can be folk healers whose expertise centers on pregnancy and delivery.
Ethnobotany: The study of relationships between people and plants, including cultural uses of plants. It documents how local plant knowledge informs healing practices.
Cultural competence in healthcare: Healthcare practice that recognizes and responds to cultural differences affecting care. Clinicians may need to understand patients’ folk-healing practices to communicate and coordinate care.