Medicine - Religion - Spirituality: Global Perspectives on Traditional, Complementary, and Alternative Healing

This book deals with the entanglements of religion and medicine in contemporary forms of traditional, complementary and alternative healing. These include studies on anthroposophy, Ayurveda, Siddha and Buddhist medicine, and transpersonal psychology in Europe, Asia and Africa. In how far are these therapeutic practices and discourses shaped by religious and medical elements? How do political and legal conditions affect them? How do they relate to religious and scientific discourses? This book discusses these questions with regard to societies in which the functional differentiation of medicine and religion is the predominant paradigm.