Reflection
Medicine to me has always been black and white. When you go sick, you went to the doctor and they run a few tests and the diagnose you and may or may not give you medication to cure your illness. I knew culture was a part of medicine, however I didn’t know that it was important to the extent of what I learned in this course. Medical Anthropologists research all aspects of the individual, their culture, environment etc. when looking into causes and treatments for certain illnesses.
The approaches that I found most interesting and helpful in understanding illness are the biological, ethnomedical and the experiential approach. The biological approach focuses on scientific reasons related to an illness. Anything that impacts an rise of an illness like genetics or environmental adaptation. The ethnomedical approach was very interesting to me because it utilizes different health systems and treatments around the world as an approach to treatment for certain diseases or illnesses. Using different cultural views from around the world is very useful, especially in the United States where there are many different cultures in one population. Lastly, the experiential approach uses narratives in order to understand how an individual views their illness and how it affects their lives as research for causes and treatments for an illness. These approaches would be very useful to me in my future career as a Public health specialist because I would have to adopt these different views in order to promote disease prevention.
This course opened up a new window of thinking when it came to the study of illness. It was surprising to me how much a culture can influence the rise of illnesses and how certain cultures treated them. The use of not only medical technology that we have today, but using spiritual beliefs and rituals in the treatment of diseases.
I would definitely recommend this course to anyone in the health care field. Out of most of the classes I took this summer, this course was the most influently. It gave me a broader view on the approach of disease and illness and a better understanding of the research done by medical anthropologists and their help with modern medicine. All healthcare providers should be required to take this course so that when they are in their practice, they are looking at illness as more than just a biological defect.
A movie I would recommend watching is Rain Man. There is a clip in this website but you really need to watch the whole movie. Not only is it a great movie, but it was the cause of awareness from autism. Without even knowing, people learned more about autism from entertainment. It is not just a movie. Another movie I would recommend is Temple Grandin. It's a movie about an autistic women that overcame her limitation in order to get her Ph.D degree and had a special interest in cattle studies. This movie is a great way to show how autism has worked to help the development of our world today. I provided a short clip below.
The approaches that I found most interesting and helpful in understanding illness are the biological, ethnomedical and the experiential approach. The biological approach focuses on scientific reasons related to an illness. Anything that impacts an rise of an illness like genetics or environmental adaptation. The ethnomedical approach was very interesting to me because it utilizes different health systems and treatments around the world as an approach to treatment for certain diseases or illnesses. Using different cultural views from around the world is very useful, especially in the United States where there are many different cultures in one population. Lastly, the experiential approach uses narratives in order to understand how an individual views their illness and how it affects their lives as research for causes and treatments for an illness. These approaches would be very useful to me in my future career as a Public health specialist because I would have to adopt these different views in order to promote disease prevention.
This course opened up a new window of thinking when it came to the study of illness. It was surprising to me how much a culture can influence the rise of illnesses and how certain cultures treated them. The use of not only medical technology that we have today, but using spiritual beliefs and rituals in the treatment of diseases.
I would definitely recommend this course to anyone in the health care field. Out of most of the classes I took this summer, this course was the most influently. It gave me a broader view on the approach of disease and illness and a better understanding of the research done by medical anthropologists and their help with modern medicine. All healthcare providers should be required to take this course so that when they are in their practice, they are looking at illness as more than just a biological defect.
A movie I would recommend watching is Rain Man. There is a clip in this website but you really need to watch the whole movie. Not only is it a great movie, but it was the cause of awareness from autism. Without even knowing, people learned more about autism from entertainment. It is not just a movie. Another movie I would recommend is Temple Grandin. It's a movie about an autistic women that overcame her limitation in order to get her Ph.D degree and had a special interest in cattle studies. This movie is a great way to show how autism has worked to help the development of our world today. I provided a short clip below.
Citations:
Dave Dunlap. "Temple Grandin Clip." 2010. Youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ff9eW0vEj0