ABSTRACT
This chapter describes culture-specific aspects of the healthcare practitioner-patient relationship, illness, disease, and the health system. People with depression, anxiety, multiple somatic complaints, and chronic pain are likely to have developed health-defeating habits of thinking that worsen their illnesses and disabilities. The chapter describes cognitive and behavioral counseling models for practitioners to use to help patients to deal with emotions that are interfering with their health. Aaron Beck, a highly respected US psychiatrist, developed a cognitive therapy model that portrays a person's mind as the interpreter of external and internal stressors and as the mediator between perceived stress and the body's response to stress. The chapter provides clues as to how practitioners can become healers who work towards curing rather than merely treating their patients' illnesses. Healthcare practitioners can educate patients about the physiological causes of panic attacks and ataques de nervios.
