The more traditional the perceived etiology, the more apt the client was to choose a traditional practitioner or, for practitioners, the more apt to prescribe traditional treatments. Our data identified specific practitioner statuses which could serve as models for the formal integration of biomedical and traditional health. While conducted in a Third World context, our findings have implications for the growing use of alternative health care in the First World. In this paper, we build a decision-model to predict how Mexican women treat childhood diarrhea. From ethnographic interviewing, we found that women's beliefs about types and causes of diarrhea, and women's perceptions about different treatments do not uniformly affect behavior.
Some beliefs appear to affect treatment choices while others have no noticeable consequences.
We also found that beliefs about diarrhea and its treatment varied among community members. The model uses 11 rules. The research has implications for medical anthropology, research methods, and medical intervention strategies. This paper provides an example of the policy implications of the need to understand emic categories. It was found that perceptions of these topics differ from the biomedical model, but are somewhat similar to the categorizations elicited from a sample of white middle class, highly educated urbanites.