Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520340841

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From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980. From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 448
Release: 1980
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520045118

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Kleinman, a psychiatrist, trained in anthropology, reports on his studies of health care in Taiwan. He describes his observations of clinical interviews between various medical practitioner, folk-healers, temple medicine men, and Chinese-style and Western-style physicians and their patients. He stress the importance of adopting the proper cultural perspective, making ones interpretations within that framework.

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 1980
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780520037069

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Patients and healers in the context of culture: an exploration of the borderland between anthropology, medicine, and psychiatry describes observations of clinical interviews between various medical practitioners, namely folk healers, temple medicine men, and Chinese style and Western style physicians, and their patients. It stresses the importance of adopting proper cultural perspectives, making one's interpretations within that framework, and relying on direct observation; and urges an integration of social and cultural methods into the routine training of doctors, so as to enable a more humane and appropriate clinical practice. Medical anthropology is rich with anecdote and description focused on one or another aspect of patients or diseases, practitioners or healing, symbolisms or religion. This book takes us beyond such details and provides an integrating theoretical framework, operational models, and a systematic methodology of study that will allow the clinician and investigator to avoid the quagmires of ethnocentricity and reductionist formulation. The material is based on ten years of comparative cross-cultural research of Chinese medical systems at the National Taiwan University, Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the National Institutes of Health.

Writing at the Margin

Writing at the Margin
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1997-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780520919471

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One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems—for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain—are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics. Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.

On Becoming a Healer

On Becoming a Healer
Author: Saul J. Weiner
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1421437821

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An invaluable guide to becoming a competent and compassionate physician. Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interpersonal dimensions of becoming a healer. Written for anyone in the health care community who hopes to grow emotionally and cognitively in the way they interact with patients, On Becoming a Healer explains how to foster doctor-patient relationships that are mutually nourishing. Dr. Saul J. Weiner, a physician-educator, argues that joy in medicine requires more than idealistic aspirations—it demands a capacity to see past the "otherness" that separates the well from the sick, the professional in a white coat from the disheveled patient in a hospital gown. Weiner scrutinizes the medical school indoctrination process and explains how it molds the physician's mindset into that of a task completer rather than a thoughtful professional. Taking a personal approach, Weiner describes his own journey to becoming an internist and pediatrician while offering concrete advice on how to take stock of your current development as a physician, how to openly and fully engage with patients, and how to establish clear boundaries that help defuse emotionally charged situations. Readers will learn how to counter judgmentalism, how to make medical decisions that take into account the whole patient, and how to incorporate the organizing principle of healing into their practice. Each chapter ends with questions for reflection and discussion to help personalize the lessons for individual learners.

Health, Healing, and Religion

Health, Healing, and Religion
Author: David R. Kinsley
Publisher: Pearson
Total Pages: 234
Release: 1996
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN:

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Explicitly dealing with the religious aspects of healing and healers, this unique and intriguing book examines illness, healing, and religion in cross-cultural perspective by looking at how sickness is understood and treated in a wide variety of cultures. Centered around three principle themes, the text: A) illustrates how crucial it is to frame illness in a meaningful context in every culture and how this process is almost always bound up with religious, spiritual, and moral concerns; B) shows how many beliefs, strategies, and practices that characterize traditional cultures also appear in Christianity, putting healing in the Christian tradition in a broad, rational context, and; C) discusses the continuities between traditional, explicitly religious, and modern medical cultures -- demonstrating that many features of modern scientific medicine are symbolic and ritualistic, and that many aspects and practices of modern medicine are similar to healing as seen in traditional, pre-scientific medical cultures. For those in the religious, anthropological and medical professions.

Inclusion

Inclusion
Author: Steven Epstein
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2010-10
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1459606027

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With Inclusion, Steven Epstein argues that strategies to achieve diversity in medical research mask deeper problems, ones that might require a different approach and different solutions. Formal concern with this issue, Epstein shows, is a fairly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1980s, scientists often studied groups of white, middle-aged men - and assumed that conclusions drawn from studying them would apply to the rest of the population. But struggles involving advocacy groups, experts, and Congress led to reforms that forced researchers to diversify the population from which they drew for clinical research. While the prominence of these inclusive practices has offered hope to traditionally underserved groups, Epstein argues that it has drawn attention away from the tremendous inequalities in health that are rooted not in biology but in society. This edition is in two volumes. The second volume ISBN is 9781458732194.

The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine

The Relevance of Social Science for Medicine
Author: L. Eisenberg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9400983794

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The central purpose of this book is to demonstrate the relevance of social science concepts, and the data derived from empirical research in those sciences, to problems in the clinical practice of medicine. As physicians, we believe that the biomedical sciences have made - and will continue to make - important con tributions to better health. At the same time, we are no less fIrmly persuaded that a comprehensive understanding of health and illness, an understanding which is necessary for effective preventive and therapeutic measures, requires equal attention to the social and cultural determinants of the health status of human populations. The authors who agreed to collaborate with us in the writ ing of this book were chosen on the basis of their experience in designing and executing research on health and health services and in teaching social science concepts and methods which are applicable to medical practice. We have not attempted to solicit contributions to cover the entire range of the social sciences as they apply to medicine. Rather, we have selected key ap proaches to illustrate the more salient areas. These include: social epidemiology, health services research, social network analysis, cultural studies of illness behavior, along with chapters on the social labeling of deviance, patterns of therapeutic communication, and economic and political analyses of macro-social factors which influence health outcomes as well as services.