Despite widespread Western misconceptions about technological "backwardness" in the Middle Eastern world, the Middle East is home to thoroughly modern, high-tech, Western-based biomedicine, often delivered in gleaming private hospitals and medical centers throughout the region. Technologies such as coronary bypass surgery, organ transplantation services, and the latest forms of in vitro fertilization are widely available in urban centers. Thus middle- to upper-class Middle Eastern patients can avail themselves of medical diagnosis and treatment services in cities such as Jiddah, Saudi Arabia; Cairo, Egypt; Tehran, Iran; or Beirut, Lebanon, with expectations that the services rendered will be on a par with those offered in the best medical centers in the West.

Bearing this medical modernity in mind, it is also important to acknowledge that popular healing traditions still exist in the Middle East, providing a less expensive...