Traditional Folk Medicine in the Turkish Folk Culture

The traditional Turkish folk medicine has a history of thousands years. This tradition existed before Islam, has continued to live then. Therefore, nowadays, old-traditional healing practices continued to be applied, contains marks of faith and beliefs of past. This tradition executed by shamans and kams, in the ancient religion and tradition, is maintained by religion men, big wives, folk healers and ocaks (that is a kind of folk healer) in the new religion and culture around. Even though present-day practices of healing tradition are reverse of modern medicine, in this tradition there are also many practices overlapping with the modern medicine. Folk healers of old tradition have benefited from nature in order to make the drugs or heal patients. This situation has continued unchanged in the new tradition as well. In addition to these, tradition of a folk pharmacy has occurred because of use of various herbs and animal products in making drug. This kind patient healing techniques and drug making applications, have reached until now with the traditional ways of transmission.

Keywords

Folk Medicine, Folk Pharmacy, Healing Herbs, Healing Places, Treatment Practices.