Have Your Say: Strengthening local communities to address the COVID-19 pandemic

To the Editors,

When it comes to understanding health, illness and disease, the West’s first wave of modernization embodied a strong emphasis on scientific and technological approaches and a deliberate suppression of nature-based elements and traditional healing practices. The “scientific approach” in medicine has been very successful in reducing mortality rates due to infectious diseases and extending people’s lives through advanced medical approaches and technologies.

According to this approach, illness or disease is a result of a biological phenomenon. Health and well-being are viewed as an absence of clinical symptoms of disease, a state of being pain-free.