Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA.
J Health Soc Behav. 2011 Mar;52(1):107-22. doi: 10.1177/0022146510395025.
Faith healing in sub-Saharan Africa has primarily been studied qualitatively among Pentecostal-Charismatic groups, and considered as its own phenomenon with little attention to its relationship to other modes of healing. Using data from Malawi, a religiously diverse African country with high HIV prevalence, we find that faith healing is pervasive across multiple religious traditions. For individuals, attending a faith healing congregation is associated with lower levels of generalized worry about AIDS, and this association is driven by those who switched churches before AIDS became widespread in rural areas. Use of condoms and traditional medicine are, on the other hand, positively associated with worry about AIDS. We argue that faith healing can be understood as a third therapeutic system that coexists with the well-documented biomedical and traditional systems. The success of faith healing approaches lies in their unique ability to combine individual-pragmatic and communal-ritualized aspects of healing to inform interpretations of the AIDS epidemic and its consequences.
信仰疗法在撒哈拉以南非洲主要在五旬节-灵恩派群体中进行定性研究，被视为一种独特的现象，很少关注其与其他治疗模式的关系。利用来自马拉维的数据，这个非洲国家宗教信仰多样，艾滋病毒感染率高，我们发现信仰疗法在多种宗教传统中普遍存在。对于个人来说，参加信仰疗法集会与对艾滋病的普遍担忧程度较低有关，这种关联是由那些在艾滋病在农村地区广泛传播之前转信其他教堂的人驱动的。另一方面，使用避孕套和传统药物与对艾滋病的担忧呈正相关。我们认为，信仰疗法可以被理解为与有据可查的生物医学和传统系统并存的第三种治疗系统。信仰疗法成功的原因在于它们独特的能力，能够将治疗的个体实用和集体仪式化方面结合起来，以解释艾滋病流行及其后果。
