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Resumo

This paper describes the rationale underlying illness treatment decisions in a rural Tarascan community in west‐central Mexico. The focus is the development and verification of a formal model of treatment choice. The model, based on cognitive‐ethnographic methods, describes the principal kinds of information involved in treatment decisions and the process whereby actors use this information in selecting among the available treatment alternatives. Applied to test data on 323 actual illness episodes, the model correctly accounts for 91 percent of the treatment choices made. The relationship of the model to other recent work on decision making in natural situations and the implications of these findings for the study of medical choice in pluralistic settings are discussed. [decision making, hierarchical choice, illness treatment, Mexican ethnomedicine, Tarascans]

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