1st Edition

Health Psychology An Interdisciplinary Approach to Health, CourseSmart eTextbook

By Deborah Fish Ragin Copyright 2006

    This reader looks at both the biological and cultural aspects of health and healing within a comparative framework.

    Health and Healing in Comparative Perspective provides both fascinating comparative ethnographic detail and a theoretical framework for organizing and interpreting information about health. While there are many health-related fields represented in this book, its core discipline is medical anthropology and its main focus is the comparative approach. Cross-cultural comparison gives anthropological analysis breadth while the evolutionary time scale gives it depth. These two features have always been fundamental to anthropology and continue to distinguish it among the social sciences. A third feature is the in-depth knowledge of culture produced by anthropological methods such as participant-observation, involving long-term presence in and research among a study population. For medical anthropology, medical sociology, public health, nursing courses.

    PART ONE:  Healers and Healing Traditions                                           
    Introduction

       1.     Backing into the Future                                                                                                                                  
    Charles Leslie
       2.     Menopause: Lessons from Anthropology                                                                                                
    Margaret Lock
    Healing Traditions

       3.     Why Not Call Modern Medicine Alternative?                                                                                         
    Don G. Bates
       4.     Concepts of Arthritis in India’s Medical Traditions: Ayurvedic and Unani Perspectives                
    Judy F. Pugh
       5.     Homeopathic Medicine in the City of Oaxaca, Mexico: Patients’ Perspectives and Observations  
    Michael B. Whiteford
       6.     The Epistemology of Traditional Healing Systems                                                                                  
    Russel Barsh
    Patients and Healers

       7.     Perturbing the System: “Hard Science”, “Soft Science”, and Social Science, the Anxiety and Madness of Method  
    Joan Cassell
       8.     Clown Doctors: Shaman Healers of Western Medicine                                                                          
    Linda Miller Van Blerkom
       9.     Shamanism and Its Discontents                                                                                                                  
    Michael Fobes Brown
    10.     Distal Nursing                                                                                                                                              
    Ruth E. Malone
    11.     Witnessing and the Medical Gaze: How Medical Students Learn to See at a Free Clinic for the Homeless   
    Beverly Ann Davenport
    PART TWO:  Biocultural Approaches                                                     

    Plasticity, Variation, Adaptation

    12.     Living at the Edge of Space                                                                                                                       
    Christopher Wills
    13.     The Co-Evolution of People, Plants, and Parasites: Biological and Cultural Adaptations to Malaria
    Nina L. Etkin
    14.     The Vital Role of the Skin in Human Natural History                                                                            
    Bruce A. Cohn
    15.     Why Genes Don’t Count (for Racial Differences in Health)                                                                 
    Alan H. Goodman
    Evolutionary Medicine

    16.     Evolution and the Origins of Disease                                                                                                      
    Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams
    17.     Evolutionary Health Promotion                                                                                                                 
    S. Boyd Eaton, Beverly I. Strassman, Randolph M. Nesse, James V. Neel, Paul W. Ewald, George C. Williams, Alan B. Weder, Stanley B. Eaton III, Staffan Lindeberg, Melvin J. Konner, Iver Mysterud, and Loren Cordain
    18.     Evolutionary Health Promotion: A Consideration of Common Counterarguments                          
    S. Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain, and Staffan Lindeberg
    Prehistory and History of Human Health

    19.     Emerging and Re-Emerging Infectious Diseases: The Third Epidemiologic Transition                   
    Ronald Barrett, Christopher W. Kuzawa, Thomas McDade, and George J. Armelagos
    20.     Health Conditions before Columbus: Paleopathology of Native North Americans                         
    Debra L. Martin and Alan H. Goodman
    21.     A Comparison of Health Complaints of Settled and Nomadic Turkana Men                                    
    Nanette L. Barkey, Benjamin C. Campbell, and Paul W. Leslie
    22.     The Resurgence of Disease: Social and Historical Perspectives on the “New” Tuberculosis       
    Matthew Gandy and Alimuddin Zumla
    23.     Implications of Pandemic Influenza for Bioterrorism Response                                                           
    Monica Schoch-Spana
    Ecology and Geography of Disease

    24.     Health Implications of Modern Agricultural Transformations: Malaria and Pellagra in Italy         
    Peter J. Brown and Elizabeth D. Whitaker
    25.     Ecology and Ethnomedicine: Exploring Links between Current Environmental Crisis and Indigenous Medical Practices        
    Charles Anyinam
    PART THREE:  Culture-Oriented Approaches                                       

    Concepts and Perspectives

    26.     Cultural Meaning, Explanations of Illness, and the Development of Comparative Frameworks    
    Linda C. Garro
    27.     The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology                            
    Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock
    Mind-Body-Universe

    28.     Breast Cancer: Reading the Omens                                                                                                          
    Margaret Lock
    29.     Refugee Stress and Folk Belief: Hmong Sudden Deaths                                                                      
    Shelley R. Adler
    30.     Deconstructing the Placebo Effect and Finding the Meaning Response                                          
    Daniel E. Moerman and Wayne B. Jonas
    31.     Possible Efficacy of a Creek Folk Medicine through Skin Absorption: An Object Lesson in Ethnopharmacology     
    Michelle M. Alexander and J. Anthony Paredes
    Explanatory Models and Social and Politico-Economic Contexts

    32.     Cultural Contexts of Ebola in Northern Uganda                                                                                     
    Barry S. Hewlett and Richard P. Amola
    33.     Health Beliefs and Folk Models of Diabetes in British Bangladeshis: A Qualitative Study           
    Trisha Greenhalgh, Cecil Helman, and A. Mu’min Chowdhury
    34.     Social Scientists and the “New” Tuberculosis                                                                                       
    Paul Farmer
    35.     Embodiment of Terror: Gendered Violence in Peacetime and Wartime in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina   
    Maria B. Olujic
    Stigma

    36.     Immigrants from Chernobyl-Affected Areas in Israel: The Link between Health and Social Adjustment      
    L.I. Remennick
    37.     Partner Notification in Context: Swedish and Zambian Experiences                                                   
    Elisabeth A. Faxelid and Kristina M. Ramstedt
    38.     Erasmus, Syphilis, and the Abuse of Stigma                                                                                          
    Christopher J.M. Whitty
    Race and Racism

    39.     Under the Shadow of Tuskegee: African Americans and Health Care                                               
    Vanessa Northington Gamble
    40.     Does Racism Harm Health? Did Child Abuse Exist before 1962? On Explicit Questions, Critical Science, and Current Controversies: An Ecosocial Perspective                                                                                                                                 
    Nancy Krieger
    41.     Getting the Numbers Right: Statistical Mischief and Racial Profiling in Heart Failure Research    
    Jonathan Kahn
    PART FOUR:  Special Topics and Case Studies                                       

    Contrasting Perspectives on Metabolic Disorders

    42.     The Double Puzzle of Diabetes                                                                                                                 
    Jared Diamond
    43.     Ethics, Epidemiology and the Thrifty Gene: Biological Determinism as a Health Hazard                
    Robyn McDermott
    Food and Food Use

    44.     Eating Dirt                                                                                                                                                     
    Gerald N. Callahan
    45.     Using Drug Foods to Capture and Enhance Labor Performance: A Cross-Cultural Perspective   
    William Jankowiak and Dan Bradburd
    46.     The State of Mind of Vegetarians: Psychological Well-Being or Distress?                                     
    Marjaana Lindeman
    Infant and Child Health

    47.     Breastfeeding, Breast Cancer, and the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in Anthropological Perspective      
    Elizabeth D. Whitaker
    48.     Growth in Indigenous and Nonindigenous Chilean Schoolchildren from Three Poverty Strata    
    Patricia Bustos, Hugh Amigo, Sergio R. Muñoz, and Reynaldo Martorell
    Sex and Gender

    49.     Genders, Sexes, and Health: What Are the Connections, and Why Does It Matter?                      
    Nancy Krieger
    50.     Female-Selective Abortion in Asia: Patterns, Policies, and Debates                                                  
    Barbara D. Miller
    51.     Women from Polygamous and Monogamous Marriages in an Out-Patient Psychiatric Clinic      
    Alean Al-Krenawi
    52.     “The Worst Hassle Is You Can’t Play Rugby”: Haemophilia and Masculinity in New Zealand    
    Julie Park
    53.     Doing Gender, Doing Surgery: Women Surgeons in a Man’s Profession                                         
    Joan Cassell
    Biotechnology and Bioethics

    54.     The Cow Tipping Point                                                                                                                              
    David Ehrenfeld
    55.     Keeping an Eye on the Global Traffic in Human Organs                                                                      
    Nancy Scheper-Hughes
    56.     Therapeutic and Reproductive Cloning: A Critique                                                                              
    Finn Bowring

    Biography

    Elizabeth D. Whitaker