Research & Article

This paper1 examines how health care in Thailand is currently at a significant and even pivotal stage of its development, as a result of attempts to improve services by integrating traditional medicine and conventional medicine. In addition, the changing roles of traditional healers in the light of government initiatives are considered, as are ways in which issues of spirituality have been neglected by mainstream health care until recently. Despite what might be viewed as a series of dichotomies into dualistic categories of mind and body, modern and traditional, and traditional healer and conventional medicine practitioner, emphasis is on how certain people are working to transcend these categories by adopting integral perspectives.