medical anthropology...

Medical anthropologists study such issues as:

• Health ramifications of ecological “adaptation and maladaptation”
• Popular health culture and domestic health care practices
• Local interpretations of bodily processes
• Changing body projects and valued bodily attributes
• Perceptions of risk, vulnerability and responsibility for illness and health care
• Risk and protective dimensions of human behavior, cultural norms and social institutions
• Preventative health and harm reduction practices
• The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
• The range of factors driving health, nutrition and health care transitions
• Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
• The social organization of clinical interactions
• The cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies
• Medical practices in the context of modernity, colonial, and post-colonial social formations
• The use and interpretation of pharmaceuticals and forms of biotechnology
• The commercialization and commodification of health and medicine
• Disease distribution and health disparity
• Differential use and availability of government and private health care resources
• The political economy of health care provision.
• The political ecology of infectious and vector borne diseases, chronic diseases and states of malnutrition, and violence
• The possibilities for a critically engaged yet clinically relevant application of anthropology