Download or read book The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine written by Anamaria Iosif Ross and published by Berg. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative medicine is not a fashionable new trend but an established cultural strategy, as well as a dynamic feature of mainstream contemporary medicine, in which elements of folk traditions are often blended with western scientific approaches. The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine is a concise yet wide-ranging exploration of non-biomedical healing. The book addresses a broad range of practices including: substance, energy and information flows (e.g. helminthic therapy); spirit, consciousness and trance (e.g. shamanism); body, movement and the senses (e.g. reiki and aromatherapy); as well as classical medical traditions as complements or alternatives to Western biomedicine (e.g. Ayurveda). Exploring the cultural underpinnings of contemporary healing methods, while assessing current ideas, topics and resources for further study, this book will be invaluable to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and health related professions such as nursing, physical and occupational therapy, and biomedicine.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine written by Anamaria Iosif Ross and published by Berg. This book was released on 2012-02-28 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative medicine is not a fashionable new trend but an established cultural strategy, as well as a dynamic feature of mainstream contemporary medicine, in which elements of folk traditions are often blended with western scientific approaches. The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine is a concise yet wide-ranging exploration of non-biomedical healing. The book addresses a broad range of practices including: substance, energy and information flows (e.g. helminthic therapy); spirit, consciousness and trance (e.g. shamanism); body, movement and the senses (e.g. reiki and aromatherapy); as well as classical medical traditions as complements or alternatives to Western biomedicine (e.g. Ayurveda). Exploring the cultural underpinnings of contemporary healing methods, while assessing current ideas, topics and resources for further study, this book will be invaluable to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and health related professions such as nursing, physical and occupational therapy, and biomedicine.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine written by Anamaria Iosif Ross and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative medicine is not a fashionable new trend but an established cultural strategy, as well as a dynamic feature of mainstream contemporary medicine, in which elements of folk traditions are often blended with western scientific approaches.The Anthropology of Alternative Medicine is a concise yet wide-ranging exploration of non-biomedical healing. The book addresses a broad range of practices including: substance, energy and information flows (e.g. helminthic therapy); spirit, consciousness and trance (e.g. shamanism); body, movement and the senses (e.g. reiki and aromatherapy); as well as classical medical traditions as complements or alternatives to Western biomedicine (e.g. Ayurveda). Exploring the cultural underpinnings of contemporary healing methods, while assessing current ideas, topics and resources for further study, this book will be invaluable to undergraduate and graduate students in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and health related professions such as nursing, physical and occupational therapy, and biomedicine.
Download or read book On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine written by Roland Littlewood and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Social scientific studies of medicine typically assume that systems of medical knowledge are uniform and consistent. But while anthropologists have long rejected the notion that cultures are discrete, bounded, and rule-drive entities, medical anthropology has been slower to develop alternative approaches to understanding cultures of health. This provocative volume considers the theoretical, methodological, and ethnographic implications of the fact that medical knowledge is frequently dynamic, incoherent, and contradictory, and that and our understanding of it is necessarily incomplete and partial. In diverse settings from indigenous cultures to Western medical industries, contributors consider such issues as how to define the boundaries of “medical” knowledge versus other kinds of knowledge; how to understand overlapping and shifting medical discourses; the medical profession’s need for anthropologists to produce “explanatory models”; the limits of the Western scientific method and the potential for methodological pluralism; constraints on fieldwork including violence and structural factors limiting access; and the subjectivity and interests of the researcher. On Knowing and Not Knowing in the Anthropology of Medicine will stimulate innovative thinking and productive debate for practitioners, researchers, and students in the social science of health and medicine.
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine written by Ruth Barcan and published by Berg. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative therapies, once the province of the hippie counterculture, are now a mainstream phenomenon. But they are more than a medical and economic sensation. At once spiritual and bodily, medical and recreational, they are an enormously popular cultural practice bound up with the pleasure-seeking drive of consumer culture as well as with spiritual and neo-liberal values. Complementary and Alternative Medicine critically examines this phenomenon - which some denounce as the triumph of superstition over reason - by asking practitioners themselves what makes these therapies so appealing. Drawing on a wealth of interviews with Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) practitioners as well as on the author's longstanding participation in CAM culture, the book provides a much needed look from both the inside and the outside of the CAM phenomenon. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, anthropology, sensory studies and sociology.
Download or read book Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America written by Hans A. Baer and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining medical pluralism in the United States from the Revolutionary War period through the end of the twentieth century, Hans Baer brings together in one convenient reference a vast array of information on healing systems as diverse as Christian Science, osteopathy, acupuncture, Santeria, southern Appalachian herbalism, evangelical faith healing, and Navajo healing. In a country where the dominant paradigm of biomedicine (medical schools, research hospitals, clinics staffed by M.D.s and R.N.s) has been long established and supported by laws and regulations, the continuing appeal of other medical systems and subsystems bears careful consideration. Distinctions of class, Baer emphasizes, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender, are fundamental to the diversity of beliefs, techniques, and social organizations represented in the phenomenon of medical pluralism. Baer traces the simultaneous emergence in the nineteenth century of formalized biomedicine and of homeopathy, botanic medicine, hydropathy, Christian Science, osteopathy, and chiropractic. He examines present-day osteopathic medicine as a system parallel to biomedicine with an emphasis on primary care; chiropractic, naturopathy, and acupuncture as professionalized heterodox medical systems; homeopathy, herbalism, bodywork, and lay midwifery in the context of the holistic health movement; Anglo-American religious healing; and folk medical systems, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In closing he focuses on the persistence of folk medical systems among working-class Americans and considers the growing interest of biomedical physicians, pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations, and government in the holistic health movement
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine written by Kevin Dew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Complementary and Alternative Medicine is a sociological investigation of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in contemporary society, and an exploration of the forces throughout the globe, across different institutions, and within different therapeutic spaces, that constrain or foster alternative medicine. Drawing on 30 years of research, the book identifies the trends in the use of CAM and explores the scientific, political and social challenges that CAM faces in relation to orthodox medicine. The author examines the varieties of CAM practices and how they manifest in different institutional spaces – including public inquiries, the orthodox medical practitioner’s consulting room, medical journals and the homes of those who use CAM. It also compares unorthodox practices in different geo-political settings, namely the global north and the global south. This book is valuable reading for higher-level undergraduate and postgraduate social science students, including those in psychology, sociology, anthropology, health sciences and related disciplines. It is relevant for courses in medical sociology, medical anthropology and social science and health, and a broader audience interested in contemporary health issues, controversies and alternative medicine.
Download or read book Healing Traditions written by Bonnie Blair O'Connor and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popularity and practice of alternative medicine continues to expand at astonishing rates. In Healing Traditions, Bonnie Blair O'Connor considers the conflicts that arise between the values and assumptions of Western, scientific medicine and those of unconventional health systems. Providing in-depth examples of the importance and benefits of alternative health practices—including the extraordinarily extensive and sophisticated HIV/AIDS alternative therapies movement—O'Connor identifies ways to integrate alternative strategies with orthodox medical treatments in order to ensure the best possible care for patients. In spite of the long-standing prediction that, as science and medicine progressed—and education became more generally available—unconventional systems would die out, they have persisted with undiminished vitality. They have, in fact, experienced a reinvigoration and expansion during the last fifteen to twenty years. In the United States, this renewal is fueled by people representing a wide cross-section of American society, and most of them also use conventional medicine. This eclecticism can result in conflicts between the values and assumptions of Western, scientific medicine and those of unconventional health systems. O'Connor demonstrates the importance of understanding how various belief systems interact and how this interaction affects health care. She argues that through neutral observation and thorough description of health belief systems it is possible to gain an understanding of those systems, to identify likely points of conflict among systems—especially conflicts that may occur in conventional care settings—and to intervene in ways that ensure the best possible care for patients.
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States written by Institute of Medicine and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2005-04-13 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integration of complementary and alternative medicine therapies (CAM) with conventional medicine is occurring in hospitals and physicians offices, health maintenance organizations (HMOs) are covering CAM therapies, insurance coverage for CAM is increasing, and integrative medicine centers and clinics are being established, many with close ties to medical schools and teaching hospitals. In determining what care to provide, the goal should be comprehensive care that uses the best scientific evidence available regarding benefits and harm, encourages a focus on healing, recognizes the importance of compassion and caring, emphasizes the centrality of relationship-based care, encourages patients to share in decision making about therapeutic options, and promotes choices in care that can include complementary therapies where appropriate. Numerous approaches to delivering integrative medicine have evolved. Complementary and Alternative Medicine in the United States identifies an urgent need for health systems research that focuses on identifying the elements of these models, the outcomes of care delivered in these models, and whether these models are cost-effective when compared to conventional practice settings. It outlines areas of research in convention and CAM therapies, ways of integrating these therapies, development of curriculum that provides further education to health professionals, and an amendment of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act to improve quality, accurate labeling, research into use of supplements, incentives for privately funded research into their efficacy, and consumer protection against all potential hazards.
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine written by Merrijoy Kelner and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-05-12 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rapid growth of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) demands that the public, the medical world, social scientists, the media, and governments pay attention. People are questioning the limits of what modern medicine can accomplish and seeking additional ways to manage their health. While many are enthusiastically adopting complementary and alternative forms of medicine, others are more sceptical. Physicians' attitudes are in transition, and governments are pondering where this increasingly important phenomenon fits into the health care system. The challenge is to keep pace with the changing ways that people view health and illness, take reposibility for themselves, and incorporate CAM into their health care. This text brings together for the first time a wide range of leading North American and European social scientists to identify who uses CAM, why they use it, and how they find out about it. Presenting research from psychology, sociology, anthropology and public health, they alert us to the current context of CAM use and provide new models and techniques for understanding its future place in health care.
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine written by Caragh Brosnan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) – as knowledge, philosophy and practice – is constituted by, and transformed through, broader social developments. Shifting the sociological focus away from CAM as a stable entity that elicits perceptions and experiences, chapters explore the forms that CAM takes in different settings, how global social transformations elicit varieties of CAM, and how CAM philosophies and practices are co-produced in the context of social change. Through engagement with frameworks from Science and Technology Studies (STS), CAM is reconceptualised as a set of practices and knowledge-making processes, and opened up to new forms of analysis. Part 1 of the book explores how and why boundaries within CAM and between CAM and other health practices, are being constructed, challenged and changed. Part 2 asks how CAM as material practice is shaped by politics and regulation in a range of national settings. Part 3 examines how evidence is being produced and used in CAM research and practice. Including studies of CAM in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, and North and South America, the volume will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and health practitioners.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Health and Healing written by Mari Womack and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Anthropology of Health and Healing provides the first holistic approach to the study of medical anthropology. Over the past two decades, medical anthropology has been the most rapidly growing subfield in anthropology, and a number of medical anthropology texts have been published, focusing primarily on public policy and health care delivery systems. Yet while anthropologists have researched topics related to medical anthropology for more than one hundred years, here Mari Womack thoroughly surveys this richly diverse field and provides an integrated approach that links together the biological, psychological, social, communicative, epidemiological, philosophical, historical, and developmental factors that shape health and healing. Book jacket.
Download or read book Complementary and Alternative Medicine written by Ruth Barcan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alternative therapies, once the province of the hippie counterculture, are now a mainstream phenomenon. But they are more than a medical and economic sensation. At once spiritual and bodily, medical and recreational, they are an enormously popular cultural practice bound up with the pleasure-seeking drive of consumer culture as well as with spiritual and neo-liberal values.Complementary and Alternative Medicine critically examines this phenomenon - which some denounce as the triumph of superstition over reason - by asking practitioners themselves what makes these therapies so appealing.Drawing on a wealth of interviews with Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) practitioners as well as on the author's longstanding participation in CAM culture, the book provides a much needed look from both the inside and the outside of the CAM phenomenon. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, anthropology, sensory studies and sociology.
Download or read book The Back Door to Medicine written by Robert Anderson M D and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2009-10-07 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthropologist typically does research by immersing oneself in a society, learning the language if need be, spending a year or two observing, asking questions, getting involved, photographing, videotaping, and writing copious notes on how people live their lives; in other words, on how they experience and manifest their culture. Anthropologists call that method "participant observation," and the goal is to produce a cultural description that can be shared with any and all who might be interested. This book describes three cultures in a single, integrated narrative. For one, it offers a case study of the culture of anthropology itself as it records how I experienced ethnographic research as both a method and a way of life. My original goal was to describe the culture of chiropractic as a prominent and important field of alternative medicine. As is common in anthropology, that seemingly straight-forward objective detoured in an unanticipated direction. I accomplished my purpose by graduating from a chiropractic college as a Doctor of Chiropractic (D.C.). Still another unanticipated diversion in this complex ethnographic adventure led to medical school, but not in an accredited institution in the United States. Taking a leave of absence from my professorship at Mills College, I eventually graduated from a Mexican medical school as a Doctor of Medicine (M.D.). I earned qualifications in medicine and surgery by entering the profession through a back door.
Download or read book African American Alternative Medicine written by Eric J. Bailey and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2002-08-30 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In order to examine the importance of alternative medicine to the African American population, this book focuses on the African American health belief system and the treatment strategies often used and documented. This book includes a cultural-historical view of alternative medicine's use within the African American community and shows how it was an integral part of African American culture. The author highlights a number of studies that examine alternative and complementary therapies associated with specific diseases among African Americans. Case studies are presented to show the types of alternative and complementary medicines used for specific diseases and to determine whether the alternative and complementary therapy was effective or not. Moreover, the cultural perceptions of the specific disease are presented to provide reasons why African Americans tend to use the particular alternative and complementary medical therapy for the disease. The book serves as a resource guide for students, healthcare professionals, researchers, policymakers, and the general public.
Download or read book Toward an Integrative Medicine written by Hans A. Baer and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2004 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Baer's exciting new book chronicles the transformation of the holistic health movement as it increasingly influences the delivery of health care in America. He describes the battle for legitimacy by alternative therapeutic practitioners, and the increasing interest by the biomedical profession in the possibilities of a complementary and integrative medical system. Baer shows ironically, how the holistic movement may ultimately become more limited as it gains acceptance and is integrated into mainstream medicine.
Download or read book Anthropology in Medical Education written by Iveris Martinez and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-03-04 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects on how anthropologists have engaged in medical education and aims to positively influence the future careers of anthropologists who are currently engaged or are considering a career in medical education. The volume is essential for medical educators, administrators, researchers, and practitioners, those interested in the history of medicine, global health, sociology of health and illness, medical and applied anthropology. For over a century, anthropologists have served in many roles in medical education: teaching, curriculum development, administration, research, and planning. Recent changes in medical education focusing on diversity, social determinants of health, and more humanistic patient-centered care have opened the door for more anthropologists in medical schools. The chapter authors describe various ways in which anthropologists have engaged and are currently involved in training physicians, in various countries, as well as potential new directions in this field. They address critical topics such as: the history of anthropology in medical education; humanism, ethics, and the culture of medicine; interprofessional and collaborative clinical care; incorporating patient perspectives in practice; addressing social determinants of health, health disparities, and cultural competence; anthropological roles in planning and implementation of medical education programs; effective strategies for teaching medical students; comparative analysis of systems of care in Japan, Uganda, France, United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada and throughout the United States; and potential new directions for anthropological engagement with medicine. The volume overall emphasizes the important role of anthropology in educating physicians throughout the world to improve patient care and population health.
