1. A multidimensional field
Medical Anthropology
A multidimensional field

2. Extra Credit 1pt
What do you know about medical anthropology?

3. Medical Anthropology Defined
Medical Anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being, the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems.
Attentive to popular health culture as bioscientific epidemiology and the social construction of knowledge.
Medical anthropologists examine how the health of individuals, larger social formations, and the environment are affected by interrelationships between humans and other species; cultural norms and social institutions; micro and macro politics; and forces of globalization as each of these affects local worlds.

4. Making since of it
The study of health related issues from a broad anthropological perspective.
Examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.

5. Extra Credit
Take a few minutes and write down 1 question you have about medical anthropology based on the definition and/or prior knowledge.
What would you like to learn from this presentation

6. Variety of Disciplines
Draws upon cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being.
Cultural?
Linguistic?
Biological?

7. Cultural Concept What is Culture?
Ethnographic field work (participant- observation)
Pro-Unique duel perspective allowing for understanding and describing while making cross cultural analysis
Con-It is hard to let go of ones bias and be truly objective. A persons status ( ethic/age/gender…) influences interactions.
EXAMPLE use of western medicine.

8. Cultural Aspect of Medical Anthropology
Participant-observation makes it possible ascertain local disease patterns, likely causes and the way people react to health threat.
The extent to which abiotic and biotic factors impact health depends on population environmental interactions.
Although ecological conditions play an important role in disease they are never the sole determining factor of disease in a population

9. Extra Credit 1pt
What are the advantages and disadvantages of ethnographic fieldwork as a method for studying human behavior?

10. Biocultural Perspective on Health
Considers the social, ecological and biological aspects of health issues and interaction with and and across populations.
Broadly holistic in considering biology and cultural important to health.( human bodies, culture and history)
Individuals differ in their biochemical processes, nutrient requirements, and internal anatomy.
Disease processes alter biological function in more or less predictable and measurable ways.
Thus in biocultural analysis biomedicine is used.

11. Bicultural…
Biomedicine views disease as having a unique biological cause within the body.
Microorganism causing infection
Growth of a malignant cell
Organ failure due to repeated abuse
Biomedical categories are used as a standard to explains cross population comparison of health and disease

12. Biomedicine differs from a bicultural approach.
Clinical biomedical understandings of disease tend to privilege the body as the only relevant “environment” for understanding of disease and causation and individuals are perceived as uniquely responsible for their health.

13. Extra Credit 1 pt
What are the diverse kinds of information that the bicultural perspectives takes into account to explain human health and disease?

14. Suffering The experience of suffering is shared by all individuals
Every cultures have methods to diagnose and treat ill health
Medical Anthropologist work to understand the diverse factors influencing variability and universality in health and disease across populations.

15. Factors in variation Cultural Ecological Biological
Subsistence practices, social arrangement, hygiene, gender roles, access to medical institutions and healers
Ecological
Climate, altitude, flora and fauna
Biological
Genes, nutritional status, immunological competence, age, sex

16. Understanding Health Distinctions
With a vast array of defining health Medical anthropologist fall to differentiating instead disease, illness, and sickness
Disease
Illness
Sickness

17. Disease Physiological alteration that impairs function in some way.
Injury
Infectious disease
Nutritional disease
Genetic disease
Chronic disease
Physiological or behavioral disorders

18. Illness
Used to describe the subjective experience of symptoms and suffering and its motivates change in in behavior to alleviate such discomfort.
The complaints (illness) is what the patient brings to the practitioner. The practitioner is the one who assigns the disease

19. Sickness
Can be equated to both disease or illness but also has a sociological meaning.
Sick roll in society. Social expectations for the sick
Stay at home
Get workman's comp
Must be legitimatized

20. Medical anthropologists study various issues, including:
Health ramifications of ecological “adaptation and maladaptation”
The political economy of health care provision.
Preventative health and harm reduction practices
The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
The range of factors driving health, nutrition and health care transitions
Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
Disease distribution and health disparity

21. Examples Goats Zombies Malaria
CC Animia, Fava bean and antioxidants, Pest Control.

22. Extra Credit
What is medical Anthropology and what do medical anthropologist study? 1 pt
WHAT IS NOT A MAJOR FACTOR CONTRIBUTE TO VARIATION IN RESPONSES TO DISEASE? 1 pt
A. Cultural
B. Ecological
C. Biological
D. Political

23. Discussion on 1 if needed
What are the advantages and disadvantages of ethnographic fieldwork as a method for studying human behavior?
What are the diverse kinds of information that the bicultural perspectives takes into account to explain human health and disease?

24. Extra Credit 4 pts
In what way do you think your own health status is a product of your biology and in what ways is it a product of your culture? Is it possible to make such a distinction?