Healing in a time of public health

Reasoning incorrectly from empirical evidence, the magical logic of the traditional healer arrives at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated because it generalises too broadly from discrete (‘accidental’) instances of success. But this is not only a logical error it is also a strategy to recruit clientele or patients by claiming that some specific empirical success can be generalised to any patient.

Public health practitioners must also recruit both patients and experimental subjects. The ostensible object of public health, however, is not its ‘public’ (patients and experimental subjects) but rather the abstract biological notion of the ‘population’. In order to reason from population to patient, public health must invert the magical logic of the healer: it must reason from the general to the specific. The randomised controlled trial (RCT), for example, seems to specify effectiveness for the single instance from the statistically general case and creates the impression for its audience, the public, that its findings are proportionally valid for any and all instances. Thus magic and RCTs exhibit invalid chains of reasoning based on sound empirical observations.

This is what I call ‘magical empiricism’, that is, a property of both the ‘evidence-based’ medical systems and interventions deriving from the RCT, and the ‘magical’ medical systems of traditional healing and complementary and alternative medicine. But the difference lies in the fact that the traditional healer and his or her patient do not lose their social being like the subject of the modern medical and public health regime who can be characterised as having only ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998: 10) as an element of the ‘population’. This, in turn, allows us to understand the appeal of the healers’ magic, their flawed logic and, often, their surprising efficacy.

The magic of the healers

Magic, as James George Frazer showed in The Golden Bough (1922) and other works, reasons incorrectly from empirical evidence, arriving at conclusions that cannot be scientifically demonstrated. But magic is much more than this. While Frazer backs up his argument with oceans of ethnographic data, my claim here is more limited.