In Mexico, a Healer Who Asks for Nothing in Return Elisabeth Malkin - The New York Times
go to original August 14, 2013

A Chiapas Medicine Man: Crowded hospitals and clinics in the Chiapas region of Mexico cannot absorb many poor patients. Sergio Castro taught himself how to treat those in need. (Janet Jarman/NYTimes)

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico — Every morning, Sergio Castro crisscrosses this city to treat the intimate struggles behind its closed doors.

Past a black metal gate, Diego Raúl López Sánchez lay on a bed in a concrete room. A motorcycle crash left him paralyzed from the neck down a few months ago, and bedsores have branded his emaciated body.

Mr. Castro cleaned and dressed the broken skin as he murmured softly to his patient. He offered advice to Mr. López’s wife, who seemed numb with despair at her husband’s new reality. He would return the next day.

Neither doctor nor priest, Mr. Castro, 72, fills one of the countless holes in Mexico’s ragged safety net, which gapes wider here in the southern state of Chiapas than just about anywhere else in the country.

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