Editorial: Why Faith Healers, Herbalists, and Folk Doctors often have better results than licensed medical practitioners.

There are a lot of people in the world getting good results with Folk Medicine, so why?

This is an opinion, and as such, it can be wrong. Just because I believe it to be true doesn’t make it so. That you have to judge for yourself.

We’ve all heard about the person that what the doctors did, didn’t help them, but when they got Folk Medicine, they got better. It happens over and over, and it is more common in areas where they don’t suppress Folk Medicine. So why does this happen?

That answer isn’t a simple answer. It is a combination of things, including that in some cases what the doctor did was right and it just took longer and in the meantime they went to a Folk Healer of some sort. But that would only account for a small percentage of the cases.

In a different small percentage of cases, it really is because the herbs combination being used are more effective. This might be a minority, but it really does happen.

Then there is the fact that Folk Doctors pays more attention to what their patients tell them and are often better at understanding them. They can be far better at telling if the patient is describing a pain from an ulcer or from eating something they shouldn’t have. Understanding them lets them be a bit better in understanding if the pain being described is a strained muscle, spring or something more serious. In this it isn’t that their medical knowledge is better, just how they interpret what the patient is saying is more dead on. This goes up the better the relationship the two develop, as Folk Doctors are far more likely to develop such a relationship. That is part of how they work. It is a big advantage and explains why some people get better, more effective health care from Folk Doctors, healers and such. But only some. You need to look to other things too.

A big one, though, is the placebo effect and its reverse. If the person thinks that they are getting better, there are changes in how their body operates that improves how well their body heals. For a great many illnesses, triggering that response is more important than the medicines used. The reverse is also true. The less they believe they are getting better, the more resources the body conserves slowing it down and the less effective that the medicine being given will work. For most people who use them, Folk Medicine can be as much as ten times more likely to convince them they will get better soon than going to any licensed medical practice.

Yet another factor, not only are Folk Doctors more likely to listen to them about their lifestyle and tell them what they need to change, people are more likely to listen to them and take their advice. This factor also leads to more people getting better.

But there is the downside. Licensed medical practitioners of all flavors make a lot of mistakes. Folk Doctors seem to make twice as many, and have little infrastructure to fix them when they do. Yet mistakes in both are the exception, not the rule.

The snake oil salesman it the other big downside. It is dead easy for a con man to set up as a Folk Healer. They have done quite a bit of damage doing so in the past, and still do in places. There has been quite a push by different groups to have all Folk Healer classified as snake oil salesmen, and sent to prison. That really should stop, Folk Medicine is too successful for that.

If a person wants to spend their own money seeing one, they should have that right. Their confidence in who they are seeing is a major part of how effective they can be.