Medical Anthropology: Cultural Differences In How Illness Is Perceived And Treated

Medical anthropology is defined as an interdisciplinary field that examines biocultural adaption, healthcare systems and human health and disease. This field is one of the most examined and developed parts of applied anthropology and regular anthropology. It is also a subfield of both cultural as well as social anthropology that looks at the manner in which society and culture is influenced and organized by topics like healthcare and health. One of the areas of examination in this field is how there are cultural differences in both treatment and perception. Various cultures possess different views, beliefs, practices, and ways of doing things that are all based on geography, background or religion.

Western

In the West, the treatment of illnesses and diseases is primarily prosecuted by way of the administration of medicine. This administration of medicine is done by healthcare professionals such as doctors, nurses and other professionals, applying methods that were developed based upon Western, scientific traditions. Western medicine is unique from other disciplines, such as Eastern medicine, because it depends a lot on medicines that have been industrially made and hard adherence to the scientific process. Western medicine involves all kinds of medical treatments that are conventional, which include radiation, chemotherapy, physical therapy and surgery. Examples of some practitioners of Western medicine include respiratory therapists, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and doctors and nurses.

Eastern

Eastern medicine is an umbrella term for a host of different practices that include, among others, herbal medicine, acupuncture, qigong and tui na. Eastern medicine is seen as possessing both flexibility and strength, which are both due to philosophical views of the east as well as the understanding that is derived from said views. This eastern philosophy provides different views (compared to a Western approach to medicine) for how medicine looks at the human body, human nature, the healing process, and the appearance and onset of disease. Techniques in Eastern medicine have been relied on for thousands of years by people to attempt to heal any diseases of the mind, diseases of the body, and also diseases of the spirit. Today, techniques in Eastern medicine are employed to treat a host of maladies, everything from cancer to back pain to depression.

Latin American/Hispanic

Hispanic medicine is practiced within the Latin American, indigenous community. Latin American medicine believes that the wellbeing of a person is intimately tied in to his or her own energy, his or her own local community, and even the whole universe. Illness and sickness, according to this same tradition, only happen when this all-important and delicate balance is out of whack. As a result, Latin American medicine asserts that the community at large is tasked with restoring the balance of the individual. The healer (substitute for Western medicine’s doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals) must first receive the personal trust of the sick person, his or her family, and even the entire, local community for any treatment to be a success.

Native American

Grouped as a healing tradition from an indigenous perspective, Native American medicine combines spiritual, ecological and cosmological views. Western medicine ignores the role of the spirit in medicine, while Native American medicine puts it in a central position. The Native American tradition sees the spirit as a vital and necessary part of the healing process. The emphasis in this medicinal tradition on the spirit is so weighty that not only is the sick person’s spirit considered important, but also the spirit of the actual medicine itself, the spirit of the healer, the spirit of the community, and ?the spirit of the sick person’s family. The context of healing is looked at as being merely a part of the whole that is bigger than the sum of all of its various parts. This belief of wholeness is symbolized in the concluding phrase of many Native American healing prayers, which refer to everyone’s relationship to the so-called Great Spirit.

Medical anthropology is a complicated and interesting field of study that allows researchers to see the cultural differences in how sicknesses and illnesses around the world are perceived and treated. It is one of the more dynamic fields that are being studied. People in the developed world are more familiar with Western medicine than any of the other alternatives, which is based primarily on a mechanistic perspective of the human body that can be fixed only by applying the laws of science. Alternative cultures and traditions (Eastern medicine, Hispanic medicine, Native American medicine) place a greater emphasis on the spirit and the connection of the individual to the greater environment and world at large.

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