Hybrid Health Systems: Negotiating Between Biomedical and Traditional Healing Approaches in South Punjab

Abstract

The present study explores the hybrid health system of South Punjab, Pakistan, whereby biomedical and traditional system exists, intersects and relates within daily health seeking processes. Instead of reflecting mutually exclusive strategies, biomedicine and indigenous healing are mutually integrated through the lives of patients and families that negotiate cultural meanings, economic limitations, religious beliefs, and structural inequalities.

Founded in the frames of medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology, postcolonial studies, and the sociology of health, the qualitative design is used in this research to evoke lived experiences and cultural explanations. Research was done in Multan, Bahawalpur, and Dera Ghazi Khan and used 50 subjects, who were patients, families, traditional healers, biomedical practitioners and community elders. Data gathering occurred by using in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation and document analysis and analyzed thematically.

The results show that the healing in South Punjab is highly cultural and religious in nature where healing is given meaning and comfort by the shrines, Quranic recitations, and spiritual healers in addition to the clinical interventions. The factors of accessibility and affordability came out as the decisive factors: whereas biomedical facilities tend to be urban, and expensive, traditional healers are local, adaptable and embedded in society. Effectiveness was perceived not just in terms of biomedical cure but also in terms of respect, trust, spiritual assurance and holistic well-being. Gender influenced decision making as male powers dominate most situations but female influence in maternal and child health, where they tend to rely on midwives (dais), who offered culturally safe spaces.

The study finds that the hybrid health system of South Punjab has not been a transitional stage but a dynamic, adjustive reaction to cultural continuity and healthcare disparities. Theoretically, it has inputted into the arguments of medical pluralism, holistic conceptualizations of health, and sociological gender and healthcare. In practice it requires traditional healers to be incorporated into health policy, to spread biomedical infrastructure in rural areas, to develop gender-conscious health policies, and community-based health education. Finally, this paper reiterates that in South Punjab health is not merely a biological, but also a social, cultural, and spiritual reality and that effective healthcare change should acknowledge and capitalize on these cross-realities.

Keywords: Hybrid health system; South Punjab; Medical pluralism; Indigenous healing; Biomedicine; Cultural health practices; Gender and healthcare; Medical anthropology; Sociology of health