Medical Anthropology 

 

Medical Anthropology 'is the study of human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation' (McElroy, 1996). It is an inter-disciplinary cross-cultural approach that compares and contrasts health-related issues of regionally-situated populations. As a sub-division of Anthropology, the discipline is concerned with understanding how different socio-cultural groups explain ill health and how they respond in terms of relieving pain or discomfort. Click here for a useful explanation of illness from a cross-cultural perspectives.  
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All social groups organise systems for dealing with issues of health and sickness based on cultural beliefs and practices. Such systems are termed ethnomedicine. Biomedicine, the ethnomedical system of the Western industrialised world, is based on a scientific paradigm that separates mind and body. Many other socio-cultural groups, however, adopt a more holistic stance regarding issues of health, sickness and healing. Click here for a useful chapter, from Cultural Anthropology (Miller, 2012), on the subject of ethnomedicine and key theoretical approaches within the discipline of Medical Anthropology.

 

Of particular interest within the discipline are notions pertaining to the body. Despite the seemingly obvious, bodies are not universal in terms of perception and attributed meanings. Instead, the body is 'the focus of a set of beliefs about its social and psychological significance, its structure and its function' (Helman, 2007: 19). Beliefs about the body influence ideas about size, shape, decoration, boundaries, inner structure and functions. They also influence notions petaining to temperature. Ayurveda, Latin American folk medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine advocate balancing heat and cold, as well as other forces within the body, to achieve optimal health and well-being. For an interesting comparison of the body in Western and Chinese Medical systems, click here.