Recognizing the significance of cultural aspects in the practice of medicine, this book places a strong emphasis on the social structure, customs, and history of the indigenous population and its ramifications on health care providers. The book also considers the econo-cultural influences on the way medicine is practiced. By including chapters that focus on health care's sudden advent as commodity and the microeconomic approach to public funding for health care facilities, the Nichters exp...

In the context of neoliberalism and global austerity measures, health care institutions around the world confront numerous challenges in attempting to meet the needs of local populations. Examples from Africa (including, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Congo), Latin America (Peru, Mexico, Guatemala), Western Europe (France, Greece), and the United States illustrate how hospitals play a significant role in the social production of health and disease in the communities where they are. Many low-resource...

In Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. Mendenhall argues that the link between sugar and diabetes overshadows the ways in which underlying biological processes linking hunger, oppression, trauma, unbridled stress, and chronic mental distress produce diabetes. The life history narratives in the book show how deeply embedded these factors are in the ways di...

By documenting that Cannabis impacts the Autonomic Nervous System to restore balance to body, mind and spirit, the author exposes its unique and hidden value for health and consciousness. This is an easily comprehended holistic explanation of the physical, psychological and spiritual benefits of marijuana, thoroughly documented by modern science and upheld with logic and anecdotal evidence. Bello has left no stone unturned and her understanding of how marijuana impacts all aspects of the h...

Michel Odent, the leading pioneer for natural childbirth, indicates that the period between conception and a child's first birthday is critical to life-long health. In this prophetic book - first published in 1986 and reproduced here in its original form - he argues that different parts of the 'primal adaptive system' develop, regulate and adjust themselves during foetal life and the time around birth and infancy. 'Everything which happens during this period of dependence on the mother has...

Why has breastfeeding re-asserted itself over the last twenty years, and why are the government, the scientific and medical communities, and so many mothers so invested in the idea? In Is Breast Best? Joan B. Wolf challenges the widespread belief that breastfeeding is medically superior to bottle-feeding. Despite the fact that breastfeeding has become the ultimate expression of maternal dedication, Wolf writes, the conviction that breastfeeding provides babies unique health benefits and th...

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...

Thirty years ago, Susan Sontag wrote, "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick ... Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." Now more than 133 million Americans live with chronic illness, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all health care dollars, and untold pain and disability.There has been an alarming rise in illnesses that defy diagnosis thr...

'Why are we losing the war against obesity and chronic disease?' This is the simple question Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson ask, exploring the dominant myth that the exploding epidemic of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes can be tackled by focusing on adult life styles. Addressing the flawed approach of the weight-loss industry, they explain why a continued focus simply on diet and exercise will fail. Highlighting the implications of the growing burden of these problems in the developin...

Recently, mass arsenic poisoning of groundwater has emerged as a disastrous public health concern in Bangladesh. Apart from hundreds of deaths that have already been reported, 85 million people are estimated to be at high risk of developing deadly arsenicosis symptoms. The severity and extent of arsenicosis have obliged the government of Bangladesh to declare it the "worst national disaster" the country has ever faced, and further to be deemed a "state of emergency." To fight this pervasiv...

This path-breaking book reinterprets Chinese medicine using the approach of the philosophy of science in a manner that strikes common ground with biomedical science. It strips Chinese medical theory of the mystique and metaphysical pretentions that too often plague the discipline, presenting this theory as being derived from empirical observations and clinical findings. Concepts like qi and phlegm and vital organs like the shen (kidney) are interpreted, not as physical entities with define...

A Companion to Medical Anthropology examines the current issues, controversies, and state of the field in medical anthropology today.Provides an expert view of the major topics and themes to concern the discipline since its founding in the 1960sWritten by leading international scholars in medical anthropologyCovers environmental health, global health, biotechnology, syndemics, nutrition, substance abuse, infectious disease, and sexuality and repro...