a. Alternative medicine is a medical practice that uses healing and preventive measures that are not viewed or practiced by western medicine. It uses healing methods that are more connected to cultural practices than that of biomedicine. It’s usually used to advance and enhance health. Alternative medicine is usually combined with palliative care to serve as a method to reduce chronic pain and illnesses. Examples of alternative medicine are acupuncture and aromatherapy. Complementary medicine is a health system that uses holistic approach to health care where it addresses medicine through the body, mind and spirituality. Complementary medicine is …show more content…
Experiential approach is about understanding the viewpoint of the person who’s ill. It helps to look at how people experience and deal with their illness. This helps create a more holistic understanding to disease and illness experience, which helps create a more beneficial and more effective treatment plan. Because illness is better understood by looking at the social and cultural norm of a society, therefore using the experiential approach will help the treatment to standup to the social and cultural norms of that particular illness.
16. List two categories of disease. Provide an example for each, with enough detail to illustrate your understanding. (5 pts)
17. List and explain two ways in which medical anthropology / anthropologists are relevant to the study of human health. (5 pts)
a. Medical anthropology applies anthropological theories and methods to questions about health, illness, medicine and health. Medical anthropology plays an important part of being cultural brokers between biomedical view of illness and disease and cultural view of illness and disease. Medical anthropology also play role in health intervention, where it designs the plan for health and how its executed and evaluated.
Please respond to four of the following questions. (28 …show more content…
Singer defines critical medical anthropology as a theoretical and practical effort to understand and respond to issues and problems of health, illness and treatment in terms of interaction between the macro-level of political economy, the national level of political and class structure, the institutional level of the health care system, the community level of popular and folk beliefs and actions, the micro-level of illness experience, behavior, and meaning, human physiology, and environmental factors. He wants health professionals and scholars to engage in system-challenging praxis that would uncover the correlation between social inequality and the working and living conditions. Also to uncover the hidden causes of poor health due to