• 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.