ANTH 1000 Lecture Notes - Traditional Tibetan Medicine, World Health Organization, Ethnomedicine
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ANTH 1000 Full Course Notes
Verified Note
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Document Summary
An introduction to health, illness, and the body: The covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of questions of health at a global scale. Anthropologists are studying how social structures shaped the pandemic and how the pandemic is reshaping social life. Understanding cultural and social experiences of covid-19 can shed light on issues of public health. The world health organization proposes that health is not just the absence of disease and infirmity but complete physical, mental, and social well-being. Most people in the world don"t or can"t attain this. Disease is a discrete, natural entity that can be clinically identified and treated by a health professional. Illness is an individual patient"s experience of being unwell, the culturally defined understanding of disease. Sickness is the individual;s public expression of illness and disease, including social expectations about how one should behave and how others will respond. Ethnomedicine refers to local systems of health and healing rooted in culturally specific norms and values.
