Ghost Illness
The interaction of physiology with cultural, psychological, and social influences is illustrated in the Comanche concept, "ghost illness" (Henderson and Adour, 1981). Ghost sickness, as the name implies, involves a belief that ghosts, often one's deceased relatives, can cause illness. Ghosts are thought to make their relatives sick to cause them to die and join them. Ghost illness is manifested by symptoms indicative of facial paralysis (Bell's palsy), such as drooping of the face, mouth, or eyelids on the affected side and facial contortions, impaired blinking, numbness, and tearing. Henderson and Adour's biocultural analysis reveals precipitating organic and psychosocial factors and an interaction between them that produces Comanche ghost sickness.
Biomedical research on facial paralysis has established a variety of organic factors. These include the disruption of nerve conduction caused by pressure on the canals housing the facial nerves, which can be caused by diabetes, infections, or physical trauma. A primary viral agent includes the herpesvirus, which may be dormant until stress results in its reactivation and disruption of nerve conduction. These viruses may provide a mechanism through which the widely recognized psychogenic ideology of ghost sickness operates.
Jones (1972) reviewed the psychosocial contributions to the manifestations of ghost sickness. The victims have often faced rejection in their efforts to reenter Comanche society, and their ghost sickness episodes reaffirm Comanche identity because it is a Comanche illness. Fright has also been implicated in the medical literature in precipitating facial paralysis. Vascular spasms can result from emotional trauma, placing pressure on facial nerves and disrupting nerve conduction. Cultural beliefs and expectations regarding contact with ghosts also contribute to the production of intensely frightening experiences that can trigger insult to the facial nerve through hormonal secretions. Ghost illness may be triggered by these and other contributing factors, including the emotional stress caused by marginalization, poor nutritional status due to low income, and lowered resistance to metabolic diseases or prior infection.
consequences derived only from biology. Hahn (1995) emphasizes that "all human conditions are equally biologic and cultural and social, cognitive, psychologic, and psycho-dynamic" (p. 59). Illnesses are determined 100 percent by biology and 100 percent by experiences produced in interaction with the environment. And as the incidences of ghost illness illustrate, the biological and the cultural are not separate and distinct influences when psychosomatic dynamics induce physiological responses to cultural beliefs.
Ethnomedical Syndromes Shortcomings of the terms folk illness, culture-bound syndromes, and culture-reactive syndromes illustrate the need for a more general term such as ethnomedical syndrome. Ethnomedical syndrome does not imply that a malady is
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