MAYAN MEDICINE
For Mayan medicine, nature is above men, determining their lives and their health-sickness process. For this reason it is worshipped and praised. The environment and cosmos have a great influence on life itself and they explain the body’s function through the laws of nature.
Mayan medicine considers men as an integral and interactive part of the cosmos and society, wherefore the entire individual’s activities will have an effect in them. Any change or action in nature, community and family, will in turn affect him, provoking either health or sickness.
This Cosmo vision affects in the Mayan medical practice and leads to specific mechanisms for diagnose and treatment.
The holistic thought of Mayan medicine intimately relates the body and the soul, the body with cosmic time, and the body with “cold” and “hot”. It handles the “vital principles” and envisages sickness as a disorder or imbalance, which can be caused, primarily, by elements with “cold” and “hot” properties. The causes that attempt against the corporal equilibrium can be produced by the very organism, by its family, by the community, by nature and by different divinities.
Performing contrary actions or the lack of respect for some of these elements, breaking the family and social equilibrium with nature, the cosmos, and divinities, may revert themselves on the individual, creating harmful forces, which in turn affect him, tampering with his equilibrium and producing sickness.
Health is then the result of living by the laws of nature and society, and sickness is the result of the transgression (violation) of these laws.
In Mayan medicine, the causes of the alteration of corporal equilibrium between “cold” and “hot” that stand out are: eating disorders, sudden movements and postures, dirtiness, weakness, emotional states, alterations in the soul, the winds, and the causes originated by other living beings.
The elements for the art of healing are born, and agree, with the process of diagnose. Rituals are performed in the church, the cornfield, heaps or hills, places where the soul was lost, etc. Mayan herbology is a very important element in the therapeutic process; animals and minerals, although not so used as herbology, are also elements used.When it comes to traditional indigenous medicine, it is not to be confused with medicinal plants. Indigenous medicine is much broader. Plants and herbology are part of it; but, also, it considers the use of animals and minerals; human resorts such as bone witchery, “magic” weeds, prayers, midwives, etc.
There are also the therapeutic resorts used by traditional indigenous medical practitioners (the use of candles, incense, beverages, rituals, etc.). All these elements, although still existent in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, are the ones which the OMIECH is trying to preserve, rescue, and promote (primarily among children and youngsters) for the continued use in the typical communities.
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