‘Get some urine—your own urine—soak a cloth in it, and put it on the back of your head. It will soak up all the swelling’. Wherever you turn in Bolivia, people seem to be brimming with medical advice for almost every ailment, be it physical or spiritual. It seems befitting that La Paz sits on what in Incan times was known as the Kollasuyo, the ‘land of medicine’. In this issue, we explore some of the different forms adopted by local healing practices.

There’s no single custom known as ‘traditional medicine’, though perhaps the most prominent local representatives are Kallawayas, indigenous to the village of Curva. We meet several of these medicine men to learn about their past, present, and future , and take a look at how this approach to healing is even used to treat mental illness. Such is their enduring popularity that even the government are trying to make their services available as part of the public healthcare system. Yet local medicine is also practiced by women healers, and even shows a sign of the exotic, such as those found in a Doña Natalia’s storage room in the Witches’ Market: ‘dried starfish, ostrich feathers and eggs, a stuffed cat, dried glittery frogs, sea urchins, coloured mushrooms, shells and coral, bones and numerous herbs drying in the shade’. We also meet an expert fracture healer, Doña Andrea, who, using lizard and snake patches, has been healing broken bones for decades.

Many of today’s maladies often call to be treated through unconventional means. Spiritual healers increasingly turn to powerful hallucinogens to tackle deep-seated traumas and even the odd midlife crisis. Or take the promise from evangelical preachers that God and faith can miraculously cure the most extreme of medical illnesses, all of which evaporate in a frenzied spasm (usually provided the appropriate donation is given)

Foreign medical practices are also finding their place within Bolivian society. Homeopathy is gaining adherents due to its holistic understanding of illness and increasing availability. Plastic surgery’s double-edged scalpel helps people with accidents and disfigurements feel more comfortable in their own skin, but some fear that through its merciless marketing, if often shapes conceptions of beauty as much as it shapes bodies and faces.

On our front and back covers we’ve tried to bring into focus what it means to live in a country where seemingly irreconcilable medical approaches can be used by a single patient. Bolivians are certainly not lacking in choice when it comes to healing.