Final Flashcards
Reading: Elliot
Pertains to the pharma industry;
Pharma don’t point out the flaws in their drugs;
Overly involved in continuing medical education;
High numbers of ghostwritten articles that are well read;
Writers need to keep the favour of the people paying them;
Science is becoming commercialized, for profit;
Reading: Lextin
Pertains to pharma industry in Canada;
Primary motivation for making drugs is profit and they have larger profit margins than any other industry;
Trips agreement gives 20 year patent and patents mean large costs;
State can’t afforts to control pharma so private pharma is allowed;
Few new drugs offer significant improvement;
Only make drugs for profit, not for poor or uncommon diseases;
Promotion to doctors becomes the doctor source of info on drugs, this is where the money is spent;
Reading: Carpenter
Asses impact of the WHO goal of health for everyone;
Goals of Alma Mata not reached, emergence of AIDS, health disparities due to capitalism;
WHO and unicef have neoliberal ideas with selective care;
Opening up trade had negative impact on poorest 40% of population;
One of the most important conditions for health is a state that is legitimate and democratically accountable;
Exportation of hazardous jobs;
There have been real gains in health but poverty and health inequality have increased since globalization due to negative activities of multinationals and ineffective govs;
Reading: Knowles
The responsibility of the individual / health and morality;
Improvement in health due to better sanitary conditions, and only in small part medicine and surgery;
Simple paradigm of medicine;
Ill health due to individual responsibility;
Cost of bad habits is born by the state;
Cost going into medicine doesn’t correlate with increased health of population;
We live in a culture that has eroded individual responsibility while maintaining individual rights - credit societ (do now, pay later);
Unhealthy lifestyles (food, stress, smoking, alcohol);
Research stresses bio and not epidemiological roots;
Reading: Leichter
Lifestyle correctness and secular morality;
Being healthy is the new secular state of grace;
Social class issue;
Good health might be conditional for employment so there is an economic punishment for being unhealthy/sinning;
Political/economic turmoil so people turn to controlling their health since it is one of the few things they can control;
Growth of gov and importance of health, decline of importance of family and religion;
People constantly surrounded by health risk warnings;
American conservatism promotes self-help so obsession with health is consistent with American values;
Elitist because it doesn’t recognize the economic and env factors that shape healthy behaviour;
Overlap bt lifestyle correctness and middle/upper class status;
Reading: Solomon and Green
The history of non-medical opiate use and control policies in canada;
First laws against opium directed at chinese and posed no risk to white middle class users;
Not until 1950s was treating addicts instead of punishing them proposed;
1908 opium act created the black market
Biomedical model assumes (about normality)
Assumes that being healthy is normal;
Quantitative - statistically normal;
Qualitative - what is functional, working properly, not deviant;
Foucault on normality
If you are not like everyone else you are abnormal
If you are abnormal you are sick. These three things are different, but have been reduced to the same thing.
Historical shifts in power
Public executions - a lot of work
Incarceration
Panopticon - you watch yourself. We bring this to the rest of society. You judge yourself while you eat french fries on behalf of your doctor.
Alan Hunt
Moral Regulation: efforts to change conduct and ethical subjectivity of individuals
Responsibilisation: process of making people responsible
Foucault inspired.
Introduced using morality in health regulation through moral projects. If you moralize something you also say someone is responsible for it (possibility that one may be blamed).
Cross cultural studies on the health-morality link
Different cultures all use moral explanations for people getting sick. Even in Western culture, people ask “what did I do to deserve this?”
Children studies on the health-morality link
Western children explain illness with morality. See it as a form of justice. “You went outside and got sick”
US christiain fundamentalism in health-morality link
Getting sick is moral retribution. AIDS was seen as god’s punishment for sexual perversion
College student food and morality study
Rated images of people eating healthily and doing health activities as more moral than people eating fast
Factors the contribute the morality of health
- The rise of secular morality
- The rise of protestantism
- Fear of harm to children
- Association with a stigmatized, marginalized or minority group
- Favourable short-term cost-benefit ratio
- Confusion about cause.
Pros of the health-morality link
Saves lives by encouraging people to have healthy lifestyles;
Force action, hold government/business accountable.
Cons of the health-morality link
Victim-Blaming - overemphasis of the factors that are under the control of people who become ill;
Focus on individual vs. structural factors;
Knowles (briefly)
Individuals need to take responsibility for their health. It is a choice not to and if you don’t, you are being a burden
Leichter (briefly)
The movement of health-morality erodes the support for community-based medicine. Excludes the poor yet again from the privileges and practices of the rich
Deterministic means
One factor determines something else
Reductive means
reducing the group to one aspect
Essentialist means
thins have an essence that is intrinsic to them and this is used to define the group
Define Race
The idea that there are human subspecies; biologically distinct groups that have distinct sets of traits.
Discuss Race
- Developed and justification for 18th century colonialism;
- Criteria used to define race often inconsistent;
- Biological foundations of race contested by social scientists and geneticists;
- Focus on racial health disparities obscures/naturalizes the effects of racism;
- Race is a social construct that has real effects through structural racism
Racialization
The social process of assigning people to racial categories. Whiteness treated as the standard and yields privileges, not disadvantages (being white doesn’t become a signif. part of one’s identity)
Structural racism
the way that society is organized in such a way to systemically discriminate against racialized groups
Define ethnicity
A system of categorization based upon presumed cultural characteristics such as culture, history, language, religion or regional affiliation
Discuss Ethnicity
- Thought to challenge biological reductionism of race by focusing on cultural/social aspects of disease and ways of dealing with disease
- Can be self-identified and empowering, but can also be ascribed by others
- Often conflated with race, immigration and visibile minority in health research
Healthy Immigrant Effect
New immigrants in Canada have an overall higher level of health than the average in Canada because the standards for immigration are so high. Over time spent in Canada this levels out with the rest of the population.
Inclusion-and-difference paradigm
Epstein. Has 2 main aims:
1) Inclusion of women and children and
2) Inclusion of people of colour
who are underrepresented in clinical studies
National Institutes and Health Revitalization Act
- Came with the inclusion-and-difference paradigm.
Meant well but…
-Encouraged biological reductionism
- Overestimates biological incommensurability between races.
-Encourages racial profiling in clinical settings (assumptions on race are used to choose treatment)
- Obscured differences within racialized groups
- Diverts attention from structural/social disparities
- Rise of recruitmentology/contract research organizations and more overseas research
Recruitmentology
A new field of study about gaining access to research participants by finding the best ways to convince them to join trials.
Researchers compete for a scarce number of racialized groups to participate in their studies.
Lot’s of studies in foreign countries where participants are ‘pharmacologically naive’, research is cheaper to conduct and there is a comparative absence of highly demanding research participants.
The 3 major outcomes of the inclusion-and-difference paradigm and the National Institute of Health Revitalization Act
- ALready marginalized groups come to bear more of the brunt of research and its risks
- Their supposedly biological differences from the ‘standard’ (white) male human are reified
- The social causes of inequality still aren’t much addressed
How is culture thought about in health care:
Fixed, homogeneous cultural ‘traits/, values and beliefs that strongly influence or determine clinically relevant behaviour.
How is culture thought about in contemporary anthro?
Flexible, ongoing process of transmitting and using knowledge conditioned by dynamics both within communities and between communities and social institutions
Problems with the way culture is thought of in health care.
- Culture seen as determining behaviour
- Emphasizes difference from the dominant group
- Emphasizes differences in the minority group
- Diverts attention from structural inequality and racism
- Justifies discrimination on basis of supposedly rational/progressive values, but it is essentially racism. People belong or don’t belong to the dominant group.
- Victim-blaming: minorities dangerous to their own health
- Pathologization of minority culture
Cultural Competence
Arose out of recognition that cultural differences between care providers and users affect immigrant health care
Having the knowledge, understanding and skills about a diverse cultural group that allows the health-care-provider to provide acceptable care.
Assumptions in Cultural Competence
- Culture is a matter of ethnicity and race
- Culture is possessed by the other; the other is/has the problem.
- The problem of cultural incompetence lies in the practitioners’ lack of familiarity with the Other
- The problem of cultural incompetence lies in the practitioner’s discriminatory attitudes toward the Other
- Cross-cultural health care involves white practitioners working with ethnic or racialized minority groups
- Cultural competence is about being confident in oneself and comfortable with others
Cultural Safety
Tries to address the role of racism and the power dynamics of interactions between users and the system.
- Requires doctor to view everyone, including themself, as bearers of culture that can affect care and responses to it.
- Service provider is responsible for addressing power relat bt user and provider;
Service user must be a part in the decision making. They determine if the care is culturally safe or not and their way of knowing must be seen as valid.
Epidemiology
statistical study of patterns of disease in the population