Social science & medicine. Part B, Medical anthropology最新文献

In rural Bangladesh, most of the population has little access to government health-care facilities. However, private health-care providers are present and active, and their social background and the main features of their medical practice are discussed. Their possible involvement in better childbirth hygiene and oral rehydration therapy is proposed.

The case of childhood leukaemia in the modern clinical context is a graphic instance of the social implications of advances on the margins of medical knowledge. Developments in the treatment of this condition have significantly altered rates of survival among sufferers. But knowledge has advanced unevenly and individual prognosis remains distressingly uncertain. A study of the families of 60 leukaemic children revealed how such technical shifts shape the experience of life-threatening illness and how apparent clinical gains serve to highlight remaining uncertainties. For such advance in medical knowledge complicates the search for meaning and predictability in the wake of threatening illness, and sharpens contradictions inherent in medicine itself and in its relationship to its wider social context. Observation of the impact of the disease revealed how medicine can be seen as ambiguous in a double sense: the more it appears to control, the more threatening is the domain where knowledge is still lacking; and the more it controls, the more alienated the layman himself from control over its effects.

A sample of 1235 case examples of remedios caseros (home remedies) was analyzed to determine the morbidity patterns for “home treated” ailments in Mexican American communities in South Texas. A group of seventy most commonly encountered ailments was discovered, as described in the paper. An analysis was made of the variations within the morbidity patterns of these ailments in relation to the age and sex of the informant. Parallels are drawn between the research findings and the results of conventional morbidity research efforts.

The author studied 200 deaf people in the San Francisco Bay Area over the age of 60 who communicate in American Sign Language. The findings indicate that deaf identity and the development of a social support system are two factors that intervene positively in the management of stigma. Coping mechanisms that build on these factors enable aged deaf people to adapt to both their disability and to old age.

After a decade of analysis of urban Amazonian folk healing, the author conducted a field study in the city of Pucallpa, Peru, by interviewing the total client population of one folk healer during a month's period. The author examines data on socio-economic and ideological characteristics of this population, and documents close correspondence of patients and healer with regard to their general view of etiology of illness and treatment, using the results of the questionnaire data.

Traditionally in Nigeria, especially in the rural areas, familism (the subordination of individual goals and decisions to those of the family) has always played a very important role if not a dominant role in the day-to-day decisions that people make about present and future plans. In the light of social changes which are said to have affected the institution of the family all over the world, this study was undertaken to see if changes have occurred in rural families in Nigeria. Specifically, the study examined (a) the extent to which people depended on the family decision for hospitalization ; (b) whether family consent was required in all cases before the sick was hospitalized, and (c) the extent to which this practice was approved by the people. In all these dimensions of the investigation, there was consistent evidence of family dominance with regard to the hospitalization of the sick member of the family. In other words, among rural people in the study area, a decision as to whether a sick person should be hospitalized or not was not yet the exclusive responsibility of an individual but that of the family. It is thus suggested that in dealing with rural people in this area, whether in a matter of health or in other planned programmes of change, individuals alone should not form the focus of expert-client relation as a decision unilaterally taken by an individual may be overturned by the family.