ANTHROP 1AA3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Syphilis, Hookworm Infection, Statistical Hypothesis Testing
17 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Ethnomedicine: study of cross-cultural health systems (which encompass many areas including perceptions & classifications of health problems, prevention measures, diagnosis, healing (magical, religious, scientific, healing substances) & healers) Originally meant to describe non-western health systems, but now includes contemporary western biomedicine (wbm) (which is a healing approach that emphasizes technology in diagnosing & treating health problems related to human body) Disease-illness dichotomy: (one set of concepts that medical anthropologists use to sort out many cross-cultural labels & perceptions) Disease: biological health problem that is objective & universal (such as bacterial/viral infection or a broken arm) Illness: culturally specific perceptions & experiences of a health problem. Depending on culture, following may be bases for labeling & classifying health problems . Cause, vector (i. e. means of transmission), affected body part, symptoms or combinations of these. Knowledgeable elders often keepers of ethnomedical knowledge which they pass down through oral traditions (which reveal indigenous patterns of classification)
