As a traditional healing art that has established a contemporary global presence, Chinese medicine defies categories and raises many interesting questions. If Chinese medicine is "traditional," why has it not disappeared with the rest of traditional Chinese society? If, as some claim, it is a science, what does that imply about what we call science? What is the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper for more than 2,000 years? In Chinese Medi...

Traditional East Asian healthcare systems have moved rapidly from the fringes of healthcare systems in the West towards the centre over the past 50 years. This change of status for traditional medicines presents their practitioners with both opportunities and challenges as the focus shifts from one of opposition towards one of integration into biomedically dominated healthcare systems. Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare examines the opportunities and challenges of...

In late imperial China, debates over how virtuosity in medical practice might be cultivated unfolded within a world that connected physicians to scholars, poets, calligraphers, Buddhist monks, Daoist life-cultivation experts and military strategists. This book traces these debates, showing how medicine was imagined as akin to poetry, how clinical insight was shaped through meditative bodily practices and how practitioners pursued empirical investigation. At the same time, medicine and the ...

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned...

Trans communities are in the headlines. Everybody has an opinion on ‘what transsexuality is’. But how do trans people them-selves describe being trans? This community based study examined this question. Findings include that the diversity and complexity of people’s experience by far exceeds what is commonly acknowledged. Physical embodiment and social acceptance are important to trans people, but the most unifying themes are self-finding, self-realization and spiritu-ality. Experiences des...

Culture and Health offers an overview of different areas of culture and health, building on foundations of medical anthropology and health behavior theory. It shows how to address the challenges of cross-cultural medicine through interdisciplinary cultural-ecological models and personal and institutional developmental approaches to cross-cultural adaptation and competency. The book addresses the perspectives of clinically applied anthropology, trans-cultural psychiatry and the medical ecol...

Since the end of the Korean War, an estimated 200,000 children from South Korea have been adopted into white families in North America, Europe, and Australia. While these transnational adoptions were initiated as an emergency measure to find homes for mixed-race children born in the aftermath of the war, the practice grew exponentially from the 1960s through the 1980s. At the height of South Korea’s “economic miracle,” adoption became an institutionalized way of dealing with poor and illeg...

Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020. In Drugs for Life, Joseph Dumit considers how our burgeoning consumption of medicine and cost of healthcare not only came to be, but also came to be taken for granted. For several years, Dumit attended pharmaceutical industry conferences; spoke with marketers, researchers, doctors, and pat...

Mainstream psychology emanated from European-American and Judeo-Christian philosophical and scientific traditions. The application of this viewpoint, which embeds colonial and imperialist concepts is less relevant to Asian and other indigenous cultures. Although it has been accepted by non-Western scholars in an attempt to emulate Western scientific practice, the mainstream viewpoint is in a process of transformation to accommodate geographically relevant perspectives. In this light, Found...

For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread...

This book is the first textbook dedicated to critically examining gender and sex in study designs, methods, and analysis in health research. In order to produce ethical, accurate, and effective research findings it is vital to integrate both sex (biological characteristics) and gender (socially constructed factors) into any health study. This book draws attention to some of the methodological complexities in this enterprise and offers ways to thoughtfully address these by drawing on empiri...

Decisive biotechnological interventions in the lottery of human life--to enhance our bodies and brains and perhaps irreversibly change our genetic makeup--have been widely rejected as unethical and undesirable and have often met with extreme hostility. But in Enhancing Evolution leading bioethicist John Harris dismantles objections to genetic engineering stem-cell research designer babies and cloning to make a forthright sweeping and rigorous ethical case for using biotechnology to im...