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ABSTRACT
HIV and emotional distress often co-occur and interact in syndemic clusters with social, political, and economic factors that amplify the ‘syndemic suffering’ of individuals. In this paper, I describe how HIV+ women seeking antiretroviral therapy (ART) at a hospital in northern Tanzania engaged with plural methods of healing to ease suffering and address the multiple dimensions of illness. I explain the case of a famous faith healer at the time of research from 2011–12, ‘Babu wa Loliondo,’ from whom a third of the women interviewed – 25 of 75 – sought care in addition to their ART. These women experienced significantly fewer symptoms of emotional distress compared with those women who did not, suggesting that either those who sought his care were already healthier, or one strategy for coping – engagement with medical pluralism – played a role in buffering against syndemic HIV and emotional distress.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the many Tanzanian women and health care workers who shared with me their time, their stories and insights. My sincere thanks also to Ben Burgen, Crystal Patil, and Allysha Winburn for insightful comments in earlier stages of writing, and to the anonymous reviewers for their help in strengthening the paper. Finally, I would like to thank the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), and the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) for their support of this work, and to Fulbright Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA), and the University of Florida Department of Anthropology and Center for African Studies for funding this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.