Navigating Medicine's Borderlands: Curanderismo and Community Partnerships in Health Education

This paper provides a first-hand analysis of the challenges and obstacles involved in establishing community partnerships with curanderos, botánicos, and traditional healers and integrating traditional healing modalities into a medical humanities curriculum at a Hispanic Serving Institution. Religion scholar Ellen Idler has been particularly adamant about the benefits of integrating the study of religion into health education and advocated for a more comprehensive and dynamic understanding of the religious and historical dimensions of health systems. More specifically, Idler argues that religion should be recognized as a social determinant of health, since religious beliefs, practices, and institutional structures significantly influence health decisions and behaviors. In this paper, I explain how I was able to effectively draw upon Idler's framework and develop an experiential learning course for pre-med and nursing students that enabled them to gain first-hand exposure of Hispanic communities’ diverse religious cultures and health practices.