Ayahuasca, a powerful psychotropic beverage commonly used among indigenous cultures across the Amazon Rain Forest, has long been an integral component to shamanic healing traditions in Amazon towns such as Iquitos, Peru. The brew causes profound alterations in consciousness, yet these universal physiological alterations are experienced in reference to specific cultural models. Cultural variables play a substantial role in framing the individual experience of illness, healing, and the revelatory nature of an ayahuasca-invoked altered state of consciousness. By analyzing the connections between models of efficacy and disease etiology, we can see that ayahuasca healing traditions encompass broader cultural models of experiential reality. In this paper I argue that cultural variables play a substantial role in framing the individual experience of illness, healing, and the revelatory nature of an ayahuasca-invoked altered state of consciousness.