Traditional Medicine Utilization in Illness Behavior: Ethiopia's Case

People through the ages have made sense of their health conditions through various ways. In the meantime, there are also common perspectives peculiar to particular society for understanding health and illness, and for responding to the concurrent perceived abnormalities. The concept of illness behavior, by taking into account the undeniable presence of individual differences and cultural or societal commonalities as well, therefore comes at this juncture. In this regard, with its holistic nature, traditional medicine has maintained a longstanding worldwide popularity and is used by many people either in the developed or developing countries. This empirical research based book, by taking in to consideration herbal treatments and religious healing in Ethiopia, substantiates the knowledge we have so far about traditional medicine from sociological point of view. It focuses on who uses traditional medicine and how and why it is used in illness behavior. In this first of its kind book, the author investigated the medical sociological concept of illness behavior in relation to the medical anthropological issue of traditional medicine by using a model from public health.