Exam 1 Flashcards

(20 cards)

1
Q

Medicalization

A
  • absorption of historically non-medical behaviors and conditions into the medical field
  • ex. from lec: alcoholism, ADHD, childbirth; good when increases awareness and research for treatment, bad when it comes to reinforcing biological hegemony
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2
Q

Dependency theory

A
  • development of western countries depends (core) on exploiting underdeveloped countries (peripheral) that depend them
  • exploitative relationship where western countries enforce practices like structural readjustment (reallocation of resources away from social welfare program to meet loan requirements)
  • Morgan says dependency theory itself isn’t bad, but its consequences reinforce biomedical hegemony
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3
Q

Critique of disease/illness

A
  • separation between disease & illness is that disease is what you “actually” have and illness is the patient experience of having whatever it is
  • Disease is a pathological state whether or not it is culturally recognized. Illness is a person’s perception and experience of certain socially disvalued states including but not limited to disease.
  • The critique of using this system to categorize sickness is that this is based on ideas of what health means in the first place. “Healthy” individuals are often based on one type of person, so diagnosis can be subjective.
  • Rosenberg argues that that the medical system places too much importance on diagnosis, prioritizing the labeling of conditions over understanding the broader context of patients’ health and experiences (which can medicalize certain normal variations in the human experience)
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4
Q

Sojourner syndrome

A
  • combined effects influence of race, gender, and class in structuring risk for African American women
  • named after Sojourner Truth, born into slavery, who proved that race, class, and gender are related through her and perseverance through adversity
  • these groups are sorted hierarchically in relation to their access to resources that are always changing
  • Leith Mullings demonstrated that without their networks of kinships, community, and adaptation, African American women would be worse off
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5
Q

Structural violence

A
  • distinction between identifying a singular cause for violence and the way large scale historical structures and systemic neglect have affected different groups of people with different access to resources over time
  • Paul Farmer: Haiti became the nation with the highest rates of HIV/AIDS because of the long-lasting effects from French colonialism (centuries of neglect in Haiti after its revolution).
  • Bad sugar: Diverting river and dam (systemic choice made possible through economic and policy systems) neglected the native community, so they’re forced to use commodity foods which creates high levels of diabetes over many years. they were focused on finding a gene that caused so many diabetes cases (biological reductionism vs. structural violence)
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6
Q

Biological reductionism

A
  • Gordon critiques the reductionist approach of biomedicine for oversimplifying complex health conditions to mere biological mechanisms
  • naturalism (body is separate from nature) so doctors don’t consider a person’s environment when diagnosing)
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7
Q

Naturalism

A

Naturalism is the belief that all events and illnesses occuring are due to biological causes rather than by human and societal control. This term has been used in the medical setting to explain that illnesses are naturally opposed as to traditional witchcraft, cultural, or religious ways or lifestyle risk factors.

  • under biological reductionism
  • Gordon critiques a strict interpretation of naturalism, arguing that it often overlooks the social, cultural, and environmental factors that significantly influence health and illness. While naturalism can provide valuable biological insights, Gordon advocates for a more comprehensive approach that includes these other dimensions.
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8
Q

Political economy of health

A
  • Doyle- ill-health is largely a product of the social and economic organization of society
  • medical practice and research are strongly influenced by their roles in maintaining and controlling a healthy labor force
  • that the medical field provides a large and growing arena for capital accumulation
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9
Q

Disease specificity

A
  • in the past, diagnoses and treatment took into account everything that affects a person’s health primarily their time and place as a disease was thought to come from imbalance (doctors would ask “were you out in the rain?”)
  • now, we separate disease from the individual body in each individual world and treat the disease the same no matter the body. the notion that disease exists is now present. biological reductionism/medicalization: we don’t consider environment anymore
  • Rosenberg: “entities outside the body” body is separate from disease entities - homosexuality (The historical diagnosis of homosexuality as a mental illness illustrates how “disease specificity” can perpetuate stigma and reinforce societal biases.)
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10
Q

Enclosed exposure

A
  • Mexican people exposed to chemical heavy cleaning supplies and not using/using gloves
  • Elizabeth Roberts: chemical source –> body. assumption in the standard environment health models that we can do things that can close off our bodies from chemicals, BUT WE CANT!
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11
Q

Medical pluralism

A
  • having multiple medical opinions in one society about how people avail themselves of different healing systems (shamans, home remedies, healthcare clinics)
  • though these practices aren’t necessarily killing a specific microbe, it’s changing something (perhaps a person’s relationship to the world, community, etc).
  • Singer argues that assuming that biomedicine is the dominant mode of healthcare is wrong, and that there is efficacy in and room for different forms of healing
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12
Q

Individualism in relation to health

A
  • focuses on the Illness aspect of disease v. illness. Illness is the sociocultural experience of health, and this falls into individualism as it is the experiences of the patient, not the disease.
  • individual is responsible for their own health- includes the idea of germ theory that they are responsible for protecting themselves
  • Gordon: how tuberculosis is thought to affect everyone the same way, meaning it can be treated the same way across the world. individuals are treated for a specific disease that is assumed to have the same course of action in each individual body in a biomedical context, which is not true
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13
Q

Critique of culture as an impediment to health

A
  • Biomedicine labels culture as an impediment to health because of the way those focusing on biomedicine believe culture makes people not believe in or take advice from medical professionals. They view this refusal to go along with any treatment as an impediment to health.
  • Comaroff: medical practices are deeply embedded in cultural and social dynamics (Africans are naked except for animal skins, Europeans remarked this in derogatory ways, saying that they’re beasts and that it would only foster disease)
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14
Q

Political etiologies

A

the idea that political decisions can affect the health of individuals and lead to the contraction of disease; Hamdy article on Egypt describing how they connect political decisions, such as that to import grain and participate in structural readjustment, leads to an increasing number of dialysis patients, critique of biological reductionism

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15
Q

Plantation politics

A

socio-political dynamics and power structures evolved from legacies of slavery and plantation systems in the US. Oyarzun: historical experiments like the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, unethical medical experimentation in the Holmesburg Prison, and broader implications of slavery illustrate systemic exploitation and health disparities faced by blacks in the US today

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16
Q

The Great Swirl

A
  • we see the body as separate from the environment, but in reality, the individual and the environment are one and intertwined
  • Roberts: dynamism of different presences: toxic plumes, cement dust, sewage filled air, processed sugar, and culture gyrating through land and body; work and domestic life intermingled…
  • opposite of enclosed exposure
17
Q

Clinically applied medical anthropology vs. critical medical anthropology

A

clinically: (tell people to stop sharing needles) centers on culture as the cause of disagreement between people and biomedicine; convince non-Western groups to accept biomedical treatment; studying patient-doctor relationships; scheper-hughes and singer; reinforces biomedical hegemony and biomedicine as the most dominant system

critically: (why are people sharing needles? This approach wants to separate aspects that medical doctors want to claim apart from things that they want to leave to social or political activists and allow the de-medicalization of those topic; using anthropological methods to analyze biomedicine itself as a cultural system and system of power; against the hegemony of biomedicine; scheper-hughes

18
Q

Essay question: Diabetes in Mexico

A

Assumptions
- Culture as an impediment to health: cultural belief that obesity is endearing is what everyone’s assumption is; there is a difference to being labeled as cultural or placing blame

Construction of the notion of diabetes epidemic
- Morgan (dependency theory) - economic prosperity of an enterprise like Coca Cola is directly profiting on the underdevelopment of communities in Mexico
- Montesi - soda companies are selling soda that is cheaper than water and using race as a classification for genetic factors

How author describes causation of the epidemic
- Genetic, specifically in one population/race (Mexican people), lack of activity
- Biological reductionism
- Political: some of the state efforts tended to frame diabetes as a “Mexican problem” which perpetuated this assumption
- Need to consider structural violence/structural adjustment
- Farmer

19
Q

Essay question: Leishmaniasis

A

Essay question: Leishmaniasis

How classification has been used in biomedicine
- Disease specificity
- Rosenberg: disease specificity is based on the idea that body and disease are separate, so things become medicalized or classified for treatment purposes but also to control populations

How a CMA approach might analyze change in leishmaniasis nomenclature over time
- Mkhwanazi: Physiological (geographic/environmental factors of disease) vs. ontological (tiny agents of illness naturally exist in nature and effect people in the same way- more likely to create a single story) model of disease (combined with structural adjustment programs, which may create a single story that bureaucratic nature of government overshadows historical and structural inequalities)
- Hamdy: She is getting us to think about poltical etiology and what are the policies that are permeating this disease
Roberts: enclosed exposure (leishmaniasis- the environment doesn’t matter, you are closed off from it), Great Swirl (place matters because you are intertwined with environment)

20
Q

Essay question: Haiti

A

Characterization of “other” group
Singer and medical pluralism
Medical pluralism: biomedicine holds a hierarchical structural (biomedical hegemony) even though there are multiple forms of healing
Fanon: during colonization, cultural practices are seen as impediments to health and needed to be changed by colonizers
HIV/AIDS isn’t new
Farmer: structural violence as affecting Haiti over time since colonization