Unfolding the Local Folk Healers (Sorhano)

Non-western folk healers (local healers or sorhano, in Western Visayas) and their methods are often dismissed by westerners, who feel that only physicians schooled in the Hippocratic tradition at an established university, can provide adequate health care (Byard, 1990; Kantarjian & Steensma, 2014). The author does not assert that local healers have a valuable role in medicine nor argues that they provide a cure-all to all illnesses. This paper rather looked into how they become sorhanos, how they consider themselves as sorhanos, their views of themselves as local therapists, their patients’ perceptions of them, conditions of patients being treated, explore on their methods/processes of treatment, and perceived effects of their treatment. The highlights of this study include: the process of becoming a sorhano begins at birth, continues throughout the lifespan and ends at death, a period in which the tag lugar choose the next person to take on the responsibility left by the previous sorhano. The patients’ perceptions of them as folkhealers; conditions that they treat as physical, psychological, and spiritual; their methods/processes/procedures of treatment ranged from lana or a kind of oil made from coconut, luy-a (ginger), also a common remedy for any kind of body pain. This paper may serve as a preliminary study that can nevertheless be sources of insights for a succeeding study to probe design into the perceptions about sorhanos.

 

Keywords: Folk healer, sorhanos, alternative healing, local therapists