Folk medicine in Sardinia

Sardinian folk medicine expressed itself in the three fundamental moments of disease management: diagnosis, treatment and the elements of a different nature used in the treatment, which were composed of a sort of collective pharmacy.
This system structure was practically preserved until the eve of the Second World War, exercising a preeminent role, in terms of the dissemination of therapies, compared to official medicine, which was struggling to penetrate the communities in a widespread way.
The barriers that prevented the spread of conventional medicine in agro-pastoral society were economic, cultural and geographical. These barriers have disappeared with that profound process of economic, social and cultural transformation that has established itself throughout Europe since the end of the Second World War, so by now the agro-pastoral society has been supplanted by a completely different model of society, of an industrial type, within which even the management of the disease has obviously taken on a completely different organization.
However, although official medicine is the dominant one, other medicines also operate within the Sardinian treatment system, to a more or less sensitive extent. Considering that a care system consists of all the therapeutic resources to which the sick person can refer, currently in our care system we can distinguish three different sectors to which to direct the search for treatment: the conventional, highly professionalized sector, with institutionalized training courses and with the support of the State; the popular sector, that is, that of traditional medicine, not professionalized, with “sui generis” training courses (outside conventional institutions), comprising both empirical and magical beliefs and practices, such as heritage not managed by institutions; the unconventional and non-traditional sector, comprising knowledge and practices that do not fall into the two previous sectors: reflexology, yoga, music therapy, dance therapy, shiatsu, pranotherapy, acupuncture, etc. This phenomenon of pluralism of care systems is present to some extent in all Western countries, but in Sardinia it still seems to take on special characteristics due to the spread of traditional medicine, which reaches dimensions above all expectations.
From recent research conducted in all the countries of Sardinia, it appears that there are certainly more than a thousand traditional healers still active; that alongside empirical therapies, magical-therapeutic rites are still very widespread; that empirical intervention produces healing results of considerable interest on some pathologies; that there are still more than one hundred thousand people who still use this system of treatment today.
Of these, more than 50% use the magical-therapeutic rite against the evil eye (about 36,600). Those who resort to traditional treatments for osteoarticular injuries make up 14.8% of the total number of users (about 10,700). The number of those who resort to the therapeutic rite against critical states attributed to fear is also quite high (3650). Other diseases with a high number of users are: burns (3670); sciatica (2900); leeks (2550); hemorrhoids (2400); shingles and Herpes Zoster (1800); skin diseases (about 1500).

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