Medicine: A Cure for Curanderismo

A boy playing in the yard fell and broke his arm; his mother rushed him not to a doctor but to a kuesero, a bonesetter with no formal training. A wife, seeing her tuberculous husband racked by coughing and wasting away, called in a curandero (healer), who prescribed donkey milk. A wife who had fallen into a deep, psychotic depression was made to lie on a dirt floor while the curandero outlined her body with a knife; then she drank the mud made with dirt collected from the knife. A child with bone cancer...

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