Spiritual healing and therapies in Brazil: a critical review and some reflections

Despite a certain crossover between scientific and non-scientific therapies, it has been empirically shown that there is a lack of scientific and academic knowledge of healing and therapies that, by and large, respond to the epithet “spiritual”. It is assumed that there is an abundance of these types of events in Brazil, of which there are probably records. An integrative review of academic reports of spiritual healing published by Brazilian researchers was conducted. Twenty-two studies were identified, the majority of which were ethnographic studies in religious contexts conducted by researchers from the field of social sciences, followed by the field of religious science, and the field of health (public health, nursing, medicine, and psychology). These studies use the concept of symbolic effectiveness to understand these phenomena. These findings underline the urgency of cross-disciplinary approaches to overcome the expressive dichotomy between nature and culture.