Unveiling Cebuano Traditional Healing Practices

This study aims to identify the features of Cebuano’s traditional healing practices. Specifically, it also answers the following objectives: analyze traditional healing in Cebuano’s perspectives, explain the traditional healing process practiced in terms of the traditional healers’ belief, and extrapolate perceptions of medical practitioners toward traditional healing. This study made use of qualitative approach, among five traditional healers who performed healing for not less than ten years, in the mountain barangays of Cebu City. These healers served as the primary informants who were selected because of their popularity in healing. The use of open-ended interview in local dialect and naturalistic observation provided a free listing of their verbatim accounts were noted and as primary narratives. Participation in the study was voluntary and participants were interviewed privately after obtaining their consent. The Cebuano traditional healing practices or “panambal” comprise the use of “himolso” (pulse-checking), “palakaw” (petition), “pasubay” (determining what causes the sickness and its possible means of healing), “pangalap” (searching) of medicinal plants for “palina” (fumigation), “tayhop” (gentle-blowing), “tutho” (saliva-blowing),“tuob” (boiling), “orasyon” (mystical prayers), “hilot” (massage), and “barang” (sorcery). Though traditional with medical science disapproval, it contributes to a mystical identity of Cebuano healers, as a manifestation of folk Catholicism belief, in order to do a good legacy to the community that needs help. For further study, researchers may conduct further the studies on the: curative effects of medicinal plants in Cebu, psychological effect pulse- checking healed persons by the mananambal, and unmasking the other features of traditional healing.

Keywords: mananambal, traditional healing, animism, Folk Catholicism