Traditional Healing in the Prevention and Treatment of Alcohol and Drug Abuse

This article reviews traditional non-Western approaches to the treatment and prevention of substance abuse and dependence. Therapeutic practices reported here are based on Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Islamic and shaman ic traditions as well as on syncretistic Christianized folk beliefs. Traditional practitioners operate outside the official health care system but in some areas in collab oration with it. Analysis of these practices reveals general principles of traditional healing and permits hypotheses on the advantages and disadvantages of traditional approaches.

Raymond Prince and the R. M. Bucke memorial society for the study of religious experience

The study of the relationship between psychiatry and religion has become an issue of increasing importance for both research and clinical practice. This article presents the history of the R. M. Bucke Memorial Society for the Study of Religious Experience, established by Raymond Prince in Montréal in 1964 as one of the first scientific societies whose aim was to investigate those characteristics of religious experience of interest to psychiatry. It also describes some of Prince's own studies on religious experience.

Masters of their conditions: at the crossroads of health, culture and performance

Achieving one's cultural or clinical identity is a matter of performance. The performing body is made through a series of apprenticeships that lead to mastery and then transmission. Performance, like culture and medicine, has its systems of learning, i.e. in the professions of the performing arts. This article examines the methodology of theater anthropology and other aspects of performance studies. Applications to intercultural work are described that make it possible for patient and healer to collaborate to master the condition.

Biological rhythms as organization and information

While it is generally acknowledged that modern science began with the quantification of time in the measurement of linear physical processes in space by Galileo and Newton, the biological sciences have only recently developed appropriate experimental and mathematical methods for the description of living systems in terms of processes of non-linear, recursive dynamics. We now recognize that living organisms have patterns of exquisitely timed processes that are as intricate as their spatial structure and organization. Self-similarities of life processes in time and space have evolved to generate an ensemble of oscillators within which analogous functions may be discerned on many different time scales. The increasing complexity of periodic relationships on and between the many levels of biological organization are uncovered by current research. Recent efforts to reformulate the foundation of physics from the quantum to the cosmological level by using the concept of information as the common denominator integrating time, structure and energy remind us of an apparently analogous suggestion in the chronobiological literature which also describes the periodic dynamics of living systems as information processing. In this paper we review the periodic processes of living systems on all levels from the molecular, genetic and cellular to the neuroendocrinological, behavioural and social domains. Biological rhythms may be conceptualized as the evolution of ever more complex dynamics of information transduction that optimize the temporal integrity, development, and survival of the organism.