Chapter 17
- 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.