Chapter 17

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• Medical Anthropology - Investigates human health and health care systems in comparative perspective
  • Focuses on health, illness, and the body are products of particular social and cultural contexts
• Human lifestyles are biocultural - Products of interactions between biology and culture
• Obesity epidemic - Linked ability of our ancestors to retain body fat
• Sickle cell anemia - Inheriting a single copy of the gene protects agaisnts malaria
• Transition from foraging to agriculture resulted in dense population with waste and water problems
• Domestication of animals bought infectious diseases (zoonotic diseases)
• Urban life made infectious disease spread rapidly
• Ethnomedicine - Comparative study of cultural ideas about wellness, illness, and healing
• Ethno-etiology - Cultural explanations about the underlying causes of health problem
  • Personalistic - disease results from aggressive and purposeful supernatural acts
  • Naturalistic - Disease results from natural forces and an upset in the balance of body elements
  • Emotionalistic - Suggests that illnesses are caused by strong emotions such as fright, anger, or grief; this is an example of a naturalistic ethno-etiology
• Biomedical - An approach to medicine that is based on the application of insights from science, particularly biology and chemistry
• Health - absence of disease

Techniques for healing

• Humoral healing - An approach to healing that seeks to treat medical ailments by achieving a balance between the forces, or elements, of the body
• Communal healing - An approach to healing that directs the combined efforts of the community toward treating illness
• Faith and the placebo effect - A response to treatment that occurs because the person receiving the treatment believes it will work, not because the treatment itself is effective
• Mental health - express psychological distress through a variety of physical and emotional symptoms
  • Schizophrenia
• Disease - medical condition that can be objectively identifies
• Illness - subjective or personal experience of being unwell and given meaning by the person and their community
  • Stigma - Makes a person experience of their illness worse
• Cultural bond syndromes - Illness recognized only within a specific culture
  • Anorexia in Western world
  • Swallowing frogs in Brazil
• Antibiotics - Began with Penicillin
• Adaptive - Traits that increase the capacity of individuals to survive and reproduce
• Biocultural evolution - Describes the interactions between biology and culture that have influenced human evolution.
• Culture-bound syndrome - An illness recognized only within a specific culture.
• Epidemiological transition - The sharp drop in mortality rates, particularly among children, that occurs in a society as a result of improved sanitation and access to healthcare.
• Maladaptive - Traits that decrease the capacity of individuals to survive and reproduce.
• Shaman - A person who specializes in contacting the world of the spirits.
• Somatic - Symptoms that are physical manifestations of emotional pain.
• Zoonotic - Diseases that have origins in animals and are transmitted to humans.

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