A Companion to Medical Anthropology (Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology)

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The fully revised new edition of the defining reference work in the field of medical anthropology A Companion to Medical Anthropology, Second Edition provides the most complete account of the key issues and debates in this dynamic, rapidly growing field. Bringing together contributions by leading international authorities in medical anthropology, this comprehensive reference work presents critical assessments and interpretations of a wide range of topical themes, including global and environmental health, political violence and war, poverty, malnutrition, substance abuse, reproductive health, and infectious diseases. Throughout the text, readers explore the global, historical, and political factors that continue to influence how health and illness are experienced and understood. The second edition is fully updated to reflect current controversies and significant new developments in the anthropology of health and related fields. More than twenty new and revised articles address research areas including war and health, illicit drug abuse, climate change and health, colonialism and modern biomedicine, activist-led research, syndemics, ethnomedicines, biocommunicability, COVID-19, and many others. Highlighting the impact medical anthropologists have on global health care policy and practice, A Companion to Medical Anthropology, Second Edition: Features specially commissioned articles by medical anthropologists working in communities worldwide Discusses future trends and emerging research areas in the field Describes biocultural approaches to health and illness and research design and methods in applied medical anthropology Addresses topics including chronic diseases, rising levels of inequality, war and health, migration and health, nutritional health, self-medication, and end of life care Part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Companions to Anthropology series, A Companion to Medical Anthropology, Second Edition, remains an indispensable resource for medical anthropologists, as well as an excellent textbook for courses in medical anthropology, ethnomedicine, global health care, and medical policy. "Medical Anthropology is a "baby boomer" of sorts. It came into being alongside the unprecedented interest in the health and wellbeing of Third World peoples in the aftermath of WW II when the world was full of the hope and possibility that science, in this case biomedicine, could alleviate human suffering due to infectious disease and malnutrition, and then help eliminate or control many of the world's major health problems. Many anthropologists of that era worked with the international health community (WHO, USAID, UNICEF, etc.) to bring biomedicine to the world. The presumption guiding this effort was that shown the effectiveness of biomedicine and modern public health methods (e.g., the health value of boiling water before drinking it), while addressing contextual and cultural barriers to change, people would readily adopt new ways and the threat of many diseases would begin to diminish. Seven decades later, a large proportion of the morbidity and mortality in our world is still due to the same tenacious problems of malnutrition, pregnancy-related complications, infectious diseases, and lack of access to high-quality health care. Although some of the diseases, like HIV/AIDS, are new, one old disease but only one, smallpox, has been eliminated. With economic development, the so-called Third World was re-branded in terms of the size of each country's economy as low or middle income countries. With more "development," these countries started to experience a mixed epidemiologic profile: "diseases of poverty," on the one hand (Farmer, 2003), and chronic conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, on the other. The raising awareness of the world interconnectedness demonstrated how health profiles depended on key social determinants of global health such as living and working conditions, level of education, neighborhood characteristics, and access to water, sanitation and health care services which are exacerbated by escalating levels of poverty, inequalities, war, genocide, and greed (Singer and Erickson, 2013)"-- Provided by publisher A Companion to Medical Anthropology Contents Notes on Contributors Introduction Part I: Theories, Applications, and Methods 1 Re/Inventing Medical Anthropology: Definitional Struggles and Key Debates (Or: Answering the Cri Du Coeur) 2 Critical Biocultural Approaches to Health and Illness 3 Applied Medical Anthropology: Praxis, Pragmatics, Politics, and Promises 4 Research Design and Methods in Medical Anthropology Part II: Contexts and Conditions 5 Culture and the Stress Process 6 Global Health 7 Syndemics in Global Health 8 The Ecology of Health and Disease 9 The Medical Anthropology of Water and Sanitation 10 Medical Anthropology of Political Violence and War 11 Medical Anthropology at the End of Life Part III: Health and Behavior 12 The Anthropology of Reproduction 13 Anthropological Approaches to Migration and Health 14 Current Approaches to Nutritional Health in Medical Anthropology 15 Cancers’ Multiplicities: Anthropologies of Interventions and Care 16 Anthropology and the Study of Illicit Drug Use 17 Revisiting Generation Rx: Emerging Trends in Pharmaceutical Enhancement, Lifestyle Regulation, Self-Medication, and Recreational Drug Use Part IV: Healthwork: Care, Treatment, and Communication 18 Ethnomedicines: Traditions of Medical Knowledge 19 Medical Pluralism: An Evolving and Contested Concept in Medical Anthropology 20 Biotechnologies of Care 21 Medicine: Colonial, Postcolonial, or Decolonial? 22 The Politics of Communicability Part V: The Road Ahead 23 When Workers’ Health is Public Health: The Structural Complicity of State Public Health Policies on Covid-19 Spread in Meat-Processing Plants and Minority Communities 24 Climate Change and Health: Anthropology and Beyond Index EULA