The challenge, therefore, presented by "alternative" medicine is aimed at the Western cultural understanding of the mind and the body. Are we culprits guilty of mystifying true dis-ease, rooted in social relations and spiritual health, by building a science of symptoms? And are we neglecting development of bio-energetic medicine and psychosocial treatment as we magnify such specifics as to obscure the condition of the whole?.
For shamans and the societies that they serve disease is not a foreign invader born from and harbored within the individual. Shamans instead view disease and the symptoms of disease as symbols of an illness born of spiritual crisis or a disharmony in the society's social construct . Taussig argues, in non-Western medical models, "signs and symptoms of disease are not "things-in-themselves", they are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity" . Therefore, physical manifestations do not comprise the focus of the shaman and are often ignored in the search for the true cause of disease in the individual. The body is a mosaic of biological signals such as fluids, scents, tissues, movements, and feelings that serve as highly charged symbols. It is in a diseased state that the body through its symbols becomes an "important repository for generating social meaning" . Shamans seek to heal illnesses by bridging the gap between the individual and the universe, working the individual's soul into harmony. The body therefore is the road to that bridge. As Jackson argues in his essay "Knowledge of the Body", "And, because one's body is the nearest approach to the universe which lies beyond cognition and words, it is the body which in so many esoteric traditions forms the bridge to universality, the means of yolking self and cosmos" . The body is recognised as a whole and that whole is seen as representative of the outside world that plays upon it.
