Chapter 10

Question 1

Q: What is health?

Answer 1

A: A persons general social, psychological, and physical condition.

Question 2

Q: What is well-being?

Answer 2

A: A culturally defined state (or role) of general physical or mental comfort and goo health; a lack of illness.

Question 3

Q: What is medical anthropology?

Answer 3

A: An area of anthropological inquiry that focuses on issues of well-being, health, illness, and disease as they are situated in their wider cultural contexts.

Question 4

Q: What is biomedicine?

Answer 4

A: Traditionally Western forms of medical knowledge and practice based on biological science.

Question 5

Q: What is disease?

Answer 5

A: Forms of biological impairment identified and explained within the discourse of biomedicine.

Question 6

Q: What is suffering?

Answer 6

A: The forms of physical, mental, or emotional distress experienced by individuals who may or may not subscribe to biomedical understandings of disease.

Question 7

Q: What is sickness?

Answer 7

A: Classifications of physical, mental, and emotional distress recognized by members of a particular cultural community.

Question 8

Q: What is culture-bound syndromes

Answer 8

A: Sicknesses, as well as the therapies to relieve them that are unique to a particular cultural group.

Question 9

Q: What is illness?

Answer 9

A: A suffering person’s own understanding of his or her distress.

Question 10

Q: What is traditional knowledge?

Answer 10

A: Knowledge that is culturally held and passed on from generation to generation

Question 11

Q: What are ethnomedical systems?

Answer 11

A: Alternative medical systems based on practices of local sociocultural groups.

Question 12

Q: What is a shaman?

Answer 12

A: A part-time religious practitioner who is believed to have the power through altered states of consciousness to travel to or contact supernatural forces directly on behalf of individuals or groups. Note that this term is not used specifically in the context of traditional America but is found in other cultures where such a religio-medical practitioner is found

Question 13

Q: What is etiology?

Answer 13

A: The study of the causes of disease and/or an illness

Question 14

Q: What is folk illness?

Answer 14

A: A culture-bound illness; a set of symptoms that are grouped together under a single label only within a particular culture.

Question 15

Q: What is a biotic?

Answer 15

A: living; biological.

Question 16

Q: What is abiotic?

Answer 16

A: Non-living; physical

Question 17

Q: What is realized niche?

Answer 17

A: The proportion of the habitable world that a group of people is forced to utilize and to which it becomes highly adapted.

Question 18

Q: What is bioaccumulation?

Answer 18

A: An accumulation of a toxic substance in a biological organism over time.

Question 19

Q: What is biomagnification?

Answer 19

A: An increase in the concentration of a toxic substance from the bottom to the top of a food chain.

Question 20

Q: What is defensive research?

Answer 20

A: Research that is designed and conducted by individuals outside the affected community without consulting members of the community about their interests or concerns.

Question 21

Q: What is positive research?

Answer 21

A: Research that is designed with fair consideration of the interests and concerns of members of the affected community and conducted with consideration of cultural contexts within the community.

Question 22

Q: What is structural violence?

Answer 22

A: Violence that results from the way that political and economic forces structure risk for various forms of suffering within a population.

Question 23

Q: What is social trauma?

Answer 23

A: Individual and group experience of negative physical, mental, and emotional effects resulting from powerfully disturbing occurrences caused by forces and agents external to the person or group.

Question 24

Q: What is the placebo effect?

Answer 24

A: An effect produced in response to an individual’s belief that a treatment will have a desired effect, despite evidence that the treatment has no medical properties.

Question 25

Q: What is managed care?

Answer 25

A: A system of care, tied to the market-based delivery of medicine, particularly in the U.S, in which a patient’s choice of treatment and of practitioner is directed by an intermediary organization that aims to provide the most cost-effective services available while generating profits for its members.

Question 26

Q: What is epidemiology?

Answer 26

A: The study of the occurrence, spread, management, and prevention of infectious diseases.