MedWorm.com provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest items from the 'Medical Anthropology Quarterly' source. Sat, 30 Jan 2010 15:43:38 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025371&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01068.x Drawing on ethnographic data collected over 13 months of fieldwork in family doctor clinics in Havana from 2004 to 2005, I examine the shifting moral and material economies of Cuban socialist medical practice. In both official ideology and in daily practice, the moral economy of ideal socialist medicine is based on an ethos of reciprocal social exchange[mdash]that is, the gift[mdash]that informs not only doctors' relationships with the Cuban state and with individual patients but also the state's policies of international medical service to developing nations. The social and economic upheavals after the fall of t Soviet Union, however, have compelled both the state and individual doctors to operate in a new local and global economy. The gift remains the central metaphor of Cuban medical pr... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025371 Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:04:44 +0100 3025371 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025384&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01081.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025384 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025384 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025383&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01080.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025383 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025383 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025382&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01079.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025382 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025382 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025381&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01078.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025381 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025381 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025380&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01077.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025380 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025380 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025379&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01076.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025379 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025379 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025378&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01075.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025378 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025378 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025377&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01074.x In periurban Costa Rica, undocumented Nicaraguan migrant women are regularly denied medical services from the state health system historically renowned for universal access. Yet Costa Ricans portray migrant women as demanding and disproportionately at fault for health system declines. Medical citizenship is under constant negotiation when undocumented migrants attempt to access state-provided services within this south-to-south migrant circuit. In this article, I draw on 13 months of field research and 138 in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders to explore the negotiations over the meanings and experiences of medical citizenship. The case study underscores the importance of medical citizenship for a growing number of south-to-south migrants, and theoretically, the gendered dimension... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025377 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025377 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025376&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01073.x The world-wide emergence of categories for diagnosing mental health problems in children and youth such as conduct disorder is often attributed to the globalization of a highly biomedical form of psychiatry. In Brazil, a small group of therapists are resisting biomedicalization by keeping psychodynamic traditions alive and aiming to transform psychotherapy into a resource for politicized youth empowerment. Nevertheless, clinical practices demonstrate an increased use of biomedical diagnoses and therapeutic routines. On the basis of fieldwork with therapists and teachers, and a nine-year-long ethnography of young people, this article explores the localized effects of these potentially contradictory developments. Results show that the growth of biomedical practices alongside politicized ther... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025376 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025376 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025375&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01072.x This study is one of the first to examine the links connecting water insecurity, gender, and emotional distress. The article presents quantitative and qualitative analyses of interview data collected from randomly selected pairs of male and female household heads (n =48) living under the same household-level conditions of water insecurity. The results provide partial confirmation of past findings that women are more likely than men to be burdened with everyday water responsibilities. However, there were no significant differences between men's and women's experiences in household water emergencies (i.e., water shortages and last-ditch attempts to buy water) and reports on some measures of emotional distress (i.e., worry, annoyance, and anger with family members). The results suggest that i... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025375 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025375 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025374&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01071.x Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research on HIV prevention programs in Poland, I explore the consequences of the shift from models of HIV prevention that emphasize "risk groups" and AIDS blame, to models that focus on "risky behaviors" and universal risk. The centrality of choice making and individual risk management in these models suggests objective risk assessment free from moralizing arguments. The Polish national prevention strategy shifted to focus on choice making, address all risk groups, and include concrete prevention strategies. This shift created a backlash that resulted in the reassertion of moral arguments about risk and risk groups that positioned those most vulnerable to HIV outside the purview of prevention efforts. AIDS organizations working with marginalized, "moral... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025374 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025374 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025373&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01070.x In this study, based on interviews with 15 recently arrived Yemeni women, I show different "idioms of distress" that connect the women's emotional states to experiences of physical space and the body. I also raise methodological and epistemological questions about conducting anthropological work in communities whose members experience profound isolation. (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025373 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025373 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3025372&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01069.x In this article, I examine the use of an ad hoc medical category[mdash]the "social case"[mdash]by psychiatrists in contemporary Romania. "Social cases" receive intensive psychiatric care, usually through long institutional stays, remaining hospitalized because psychiatrists perceive them as too poor and, thus, "unfit" to survive without the welfare assistance provided by institutionalization. The "social case" label emerges at the intersection of (1) plans by the state to deinstitutionalize public mental health care, (2) the rise of a new class of downwardly mobile and increasingly poor formerly working-class people, and (3) the desire of psychiatrists to protect their patients in the face of neoliberal assaults on Romanian welfare state support for publicly funded mental health care. Disa... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3025372 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100 3025372 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666297&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01056.x This article examines a local version of medical public discourse about fetal images produced through ultrasonography in Israel, where this technology has gained huge popularity. Nevertheless, I argue, ultrasound in Israel has not become engaged in the discursive production of "fetal subjects" central to the Euro-American life politics. Fetal images in Israel have become entangled in a "politics of threatened life": where "life" stands typically for the pregnant woman and "threat" for the fetus, while the prospect of a reproductive misfortune is the fabric through which pregnancies, regardless of their medical categorization as "low risk" or "high risk," are navigated and negotiated by doctors and women. The same processes of separation generated by ultrasonography forge different imagined... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666297 Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:57:31 +0100 2666297 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666308&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01067.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666308 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666308 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666307&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01062_3.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666307 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666307 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666306&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01062_2.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666306 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666306 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666305&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01062_1.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666305 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666305 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666304&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01061.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666304 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666304 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666303&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01066.x Following reduction in mortality rates of term and preterm babies hospitalized in NICUs, neonataology refocused its concerns on the survivors' elevated risks of long-term health and developmental problems, thus turning the "intact survival" of hospitalized newborns into an equivalently desired moral and professional goal as their "survival." Based on ethnographic observations in an Israeli NICU ("pagia"), I suggest that the new moral practice has bearings on the construction of neonatal subjectivities. According to Jewish and Israeli laws, personhood is conferred on at birth. However, my findings indicate that in practice the question of "quality of life" often appears to be a stronger consideration than legal personhood when withdrawal of intensive therapies is discussed in the nursery. C... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666303 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666303 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666302&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01065.x This article addresses two concepts that are quite widespread among Latin American cultures: susto or "'fright sickness," and the "masters of the animal species" philosophy, whereby individual animal spirits are believed to be "owned" by species-specific spiritual masters. This is the first article to integrate both these aspects, drawing from ethnographic data from the Trinitario people in Bolivia collected through participant-observation and semistructured ethnobotanical interviews on medicinal plants. Although Trinitarios have a long history of agriculture, their worldview is still partly one of animistic hunter and fisherman societies. This worldview is reflected in Trinitario susto etiology and treatment. Susto is locally believed to originate through soul theft by a variety of master... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666302 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666302 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666301&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01060.x In 2005, New Mexico implemented a unique reform in managed behavioral health services that seeks to ensure delivery of consumer-driven, recovery-oriented care to low-income individuals. Distinguishing features of the reform are the Local Collaboratives (LCs), regionally based community organizations designed by state government to represent behavioral health concerns of New Mexico's diverse cultural populations. We examine community response to the LCs, focusing on two broad sets of themes derived from 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork. The first set[mdash]structure and function[mdash]encompasses several issues: predominance of provider versus consumer voice; insufficient resources to support internal operations; imposition of state administrative demands; and perceived lack of state res... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666301 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666301 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666300&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01059.x This study indicates that conceptualizations of the political economy of treatment seeking need to more fully acknowledge the dynamic nature of the microlevel political economic context of treatment seeking, including the domino social, economic, and health effects of structurally problematic health care systems. (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666300 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666300 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666299&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01058.x As states weaken and public health care deteriorates throughout the developing world, new spaces are opening for civil society groups to fill the gaps of declining health systems. In Mexico, popular health groups have responded to health care decline by building community clinics, establishing health promoter training programs, and opening natural medicine pharmacies. Lower- and working-class women are the primary participants in these groups that use a self-help approach to find practical solutions to local health care problems. However, little is known about participants' circumstances, motivations, or the ideals they embrace. Drawing from women's narratives, I explore the "micropolitics" of women's participation in local health groups. I examine their efforts to reclaim control over the... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666299 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666299 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2666298&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01057.x In this article, I contrast conceptualizations of authoritative knowledge in pregnancy and birth between U.S. midwives and their Mexican immigrant clients at a religious birthing center in south Texas. Although the two groups share certain orientations to pregnancy management, essential differences in prenatal care and birth epistemologies underscore distinct social and economic positions. I use narrative data to document and explain these differences, which throw into relief the hierarchies of identity and need that structure immigrant women's reproductive experiences. Unveiling the different epistemologies can also help to explain sometimes radically divergent ideas that have impacted the very survivability of the birthing center. By focusing on Mexican immigrant women's reproductive dec... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2666298 Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2666298 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498590&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01047.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498590 Sun, 31 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498590 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498598&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01054_2.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498598 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498598 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498597&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01054_1.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498597 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498597 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498596&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01053.x The fall of state socialism in Poland in 1989 constituted a critical moment that redefined policies regulating reproductive health and access to care. As the Polish state adopted the discourse and agenda of the Catholic Church in its health policies, reproduction and sexuality became sites of moral governance through the implementation of the Conscience Clause law, which permits healthcare providers to deny medical services citing conscience-based objections. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the effects of the implementation of the conscience clause and argues that the adoption of this law for individual use paved the way for restrictions on reproductive healthcare on a systemic scale. The special status afforded to the church is highly significant for access to healt... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498596 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498596 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498595&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01052.x Growing public health attention has been placed on the HIV vulnerability of males who sell sex to males in India. However, there is little research that outlines the trajectories through which males come to be involved in practicing sex work in India. Locating "male sex work" within a vibrant social, political, and erotic landscape, this article explores the intertwining of "sexual subjectivity" and "sex work." The authors refer to 70 sexual life histories generated from research conducted in Mysore to unsettle dominant public health notions that regard male sex work as rooted solely in poverty or as a decontexualized "behavioral risk factor." Such perspectives are countered by demonstrating how male sex work in Mysore encompasses a complex interplay between self-realization, sexual desire... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498595 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498595 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498594&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01051.x Rather than viewing therapeutic interventions as either compliance or resistance to the social order, I analyze them as mimesis of cultural ideal selves. In particular, I examine the new mediations of the social order constituted in mimetic therapeutic practices and their entailed creativity and ambivalence. Drawing on participant observation in a Jewish ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) rehabilitation site I explore how, given the ruptures brought about in mental disorders, caretakers offer their clients new ways to inhabit the normal self through its imitation. Specifically, caregivers construct replications of dominant selves by selectively deploying modern and neotraditional discourses of the self in diverse social contexts and in multiple registries like body, emotions, social relations, and wa... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498594 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498594 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498593&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01050.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498593 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498593 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498592&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01049.x In this case study, I use ethnographic data to explore how community engagement and science are deployed at the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, with the goal of formulating an understanding of the personalized meanings of science[ndash]community relations for key environmental public health experts. In focus is the cultural discourse circulating in the agency that exposes the real concerns, beliefs, and attitudes of these scientists and experts vis-à-vis their community engagement experiences. Finally, I propose that critical attention to the place of power relations, knowledge politics, and environmental justice are fundamental to studies of toxic contamination where commitments to community engagement and quality science are joined to form a positive research goal... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498592 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498592 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2498591&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1111%252Fj.1548-1387.2009.01048.x (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2498591 Sun, 10 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100 2498591 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161064&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189719%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Luborsky M, Sankar A PMID: 19189719 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161064 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161064 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161063&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189720%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Taylor JS The onset of dementia raises troubling questions. Does the person with dementia still recognize you? If someone cannot recognize you, can they still care about you? This essay takes such questions as the entry point for a broader inquiry into recognition, its linkages to care, and how claims to social and political "recognition" are linked to, or premised on, the demonstrated capacity to "recognize" people and things. In the words and actions of her severely impaired mother, the author finds guidance toward a better, more compassionate question to ask about dementia: how can we best strive to "keep the cares together"? PMID: 19189720 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161063 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161063 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161062&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189721%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Cohen L PMID: 19189721 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161062 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161062 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161061&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189722%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines pregnant undocumented women's experiences with the health care system and relationship to the state in Germany. It also provides a discussion of how a restrictive immigration climate, particular models of citizenship, and liberal family laws have resulted in unique practices surrounding paternity claims. It is based on long-term ethnographic data to highlight contradictions and ambiguities in the policy environment and utilizes the notion of stratified reproduction to bring new evidence regarding mothers' deportability and practices of paternity. PMID: 19189722 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161061 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161061 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161060&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189723%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Hansen HP, Tjørnhøj-Thomsen T A fundamental assumption behind cancer rehabilitation in many Western societies is that cancer survivors can return to normal life by learning to deal with the consequences of their illness and their treatment. This assumption is supported by increasing political attention to cancer rehabilitation and a growth in residential cancer-rehabilitation initiatives in Denmark (Danish Cancer Society 1999; Government of Denmark 2003). On the basis of their ethnographic fieldwork in residential-cancer rehabilitation courses, the authors examine the new rehabilitation discourse. They argue that this discourse has challenged the dominant illness narrative, "sick-helped-cured," producing a new narrative, "sick-helped-as if cured," and that this new n... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161060 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161060 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161059&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189724%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Jenkins JH, Carpenter-Song EA In this article, we identify an array of creative strategies used by persons diagnosed with schizophrenia-related illness to deflect and resist social stigma, and address the lived experience of deploying these strategies in the intersubjective context of everyday life. The data are derived from anthropological interviews and ethnographic observations of ninety persons who received treatment at community mental health facilities in an urban North American locale. Nearly all were keenly aware of stigma that permeated their lives. Their predicament is contradictory: on the one hand, they have recovered relative to previous states of psychosis; on the other hand, their subjectivity is saturated by intense awareness of social stigma that seems intract... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161059 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161059 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161058&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189725%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Pfeiffer J, Nichter M, PMID: 19189725 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161058 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161058 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2161057&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19189726%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Inhorn MC PMID: 19189726 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2161057 Mon, 01 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100 2161057 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1970147&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19014013%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Wood K, Lambert H In this ethnographic article, we explore the character of local discourse about AIDS in an affected township community in South Africa, describing the "indirection" that characterized communication about suspected cases of AIDS. Through a case study of one affected family, the article first explores the diverse ways in which people came to "know" that specific cases of illness were AIDS related, and how this "knowledge" was communicated. We consider why communication was indirect and coded, arguing that this reflected nota "denial" of its presence in this community but, rather, a complex group of overlapping concerns far from unique to AIDS: first, a normative injunction on naming potentially fatal conditions; second, an interest in pursuing different therape... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1970147 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1970147 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1970146&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19014014%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Park M A tension in medical anthropology, as an interdisciplinary field, exists between those polar territories of the logic--and therefore grammars--of a positivist-scientific stance of biomedicine and a literary-philosophical one used to represent experience. Taking up literary-philosophical and existential perspectives from anthropology proper, I draw on an ethnographic study of a sensory-integration-based clinic to propose that imaginative practices are one arena where such tension can be worked out. Enacted narratives, as a method, reveal how imaginative practices foreground the ways in which desire and hope are integral to healing. Kenneth Burke's (1969 [1945]) theory of dramatism, particularly his scene : act ratio, provides an analytic lens to examine the imaginary pla... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1970146 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1970146 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1970145&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19014015%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Foley EE In this article, I trace the links among neoliberalism, regional ecological decline, and the dynamics of therapeutic processes in rural Senegal. By focusing on illness management in a small rural community, the article explores how economic reform is mediated by existing social structures, and how household social organization in turn influences therapeutic decision making. The illness episodes relayed here demonstrate how the acute economic and social crisis facing the Ganjool region becomes written on the bodies of young men, and how the fault lines of gender and generation shape illness experiences. These narratives also illuminate the tremendous discrepancy between the lived realities of sickness and death, and the idealized models of health participation and empo... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1970145 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1970145 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1970144&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D19014016%26dopt%3DAbstract This article explores the embodied process of being anorexic and the moral repertoires within which this process is entangled. The point of departure for this discussion is that, while critical feminist epistemology plays an important role in politicizing anorexia as a symbolic cluster of meanings, it has provided us with limited analytical tools for an in-depth understanding of an anorexic's lived experiences and of the embodied realities involved in being anorexic. At the same time, autobiographical accounts of anorexia provide insightful emic perspectives on being anorexic but are not engaged with symbolic and theoretical etic perspectives on anorexia. This article attempts to bridge this gap through an anthropological exploration of anorexia from within; that is, as a situated embodied... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1970144 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1970144 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1726953&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18717363%26dopt%3DAbstract This article shows how everyday moral talk is coproduced by both the immediate contexts of clinical work and the categories of formal bioethics. PMID: 18717363 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1726953 Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1726953 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1726952&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18717364%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Baer RD, Weller SC, de Alba García JG, Rocha AL We compare physicians and laypeople within and across cultures, focusing on similarities and differences across samples, to determine whether cultural differences or lay-professional differences have a greater effect on explanatory models of the common cold. Data on explanatory models for the common cold were collected from physicians and laypeople in South Texas and Guadalajara, Mexico. Structured interview materials were developed on the basis of open-ended interviews with samples of lay informants at each locale. A structured questionnaire was used to collect information from each sample on causes, symptoms, and treatments for the common cold. Consensus analysis was used to estimate the cultural beliefs for each sample. I... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1726952 Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1726952 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1726951&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18717365%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Buckser A In this article, I examine the ways that people with Tourette Syndrome (TS) manage the motor and vocal tics characteristic of this neurological disorder. To mitigate the powerful stigmas associated with TS, individuals must either remove tics from public view or strive to recast the way that they are perceived. Drawing on ethnographic research with TS sufferers in Indiana, I elaborate three strategies by which this is done, strategies referred to here as displacement, misattribution, and contextualization. These processes strongly affect both the symptoms themselves and the subjective experience of the illness. They also affect the perception of TS in the larger culture, associating the disease with florid symptoms like cursing--symptoms that, although not at all typ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1726951 Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:00:00 +0100 1726951 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618657&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18610811%26dopt%3DAbstract This article argues for a more reflexive understanding of U.S. biomedical culture as a replacement for the current "sound bite" model of cultural diversity. PMID: 18610811 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618657 Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100 1618657 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618656&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18610812%26dopt%3DAbstract We present a content analysis of Medical Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, based on a systematic random sample of empirical research articles (n = 283) published in these journals from 1977 to 2002. We identify both differences and similarities in the use of race, ethnicity, and racism concepts in medical anthropology and neighboring disciplines, and we offer recommendations for ways that medical anthropologists can contribute to the broader debate over racial and ethnic inequalities in health. PMID: 18610812 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618656 Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100 1618656 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618655&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18610813%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Baer H In this article, I examine the process by which some biomedical physicians and nurses in Australia have come to adopt various alternative therapies in their regimens of practice, largely in response to (1) the growing interest on the part of many Australians in what is generally called "complementary medicine", and (2) a recognition that biomedicine is not particularly effective in treating an array of chronic ailments. Some Australian biomedical physicians and nurses have come to embrace "integrative medicine," which purports to blend the best of biomedicine and complementary medicine, and have even created an Australasian Integrative Medical Association and established integrative medical training programs and centers. I argue that the adoption of alternative therapie... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618655 Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100 1618655 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618654&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18610814%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Kamat VR In this article, I examine the cultural interpretations of degedege, an indigenous illness commonly recognized by the Zaramo people of coastal Tanzania as life threatening. Drawing on the narratives of three bereaved parents who lost a child to degedege, I analyze the contextual and circumstantial factors involved in these parents' negotiation of the identity of an illness and in their subsequent therapy seeking behavior. I show that even though cultural knowledge and etiological beliefs about degedege may be shared locally, there is significant variation in the therapeutic pathways that parents follow to deal with an actual episode of the illness. I emphasize the need for more contextualized data on health-seeking behaviors, and argue that it is necessary to pay atte... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618654 Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100 1618654 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618653&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18610815%26dopt%3DAbstract This article focuses on the life history of a single street boy in northwestern Tanzania, whom I name Juma. I suggest that Juma's experiences and the life trajectory of himself and of significant individuals around him (particularly his mother) were structured by everyday violence. I describe everyday violence in terms of a conjuncture between macrostructural forces in East Africa (including a history of failed development schemes and the contemporary political economy of neoliberalism) and the lived experience of individuals as they negotiate local, contextual factors (including land-tenure practices, the power dynamics between immediate and extended kin, life on the streets, and constructions of gender and sexuality). I suggest that AIDS and its many impacts on Juma's life course can onl... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618653 Sat, 01 Mar 2008 05:00:00 +0100 1618653 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618660&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18074902%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Pylypa J In Northeast Thailand, khai mak mai (fruit fever) is a local, ethnomedical category of illness identified by community members as untreatable by biomedical health providers. The illness is believed to be incompatible with several substances that may induce death, including fruit as well as two forms of medication associated with biomedical care: injections and intravenous solution. Consequently, fevers suspected of being khai mak mai are treated by herbalists while biomedical health services are avoided and feared. In this article, I examine local perceptions and treatment of khai mak mai. I also explore the context and consequences of concerns about the inadequacy of biomedical care, as well as the social meanings associated with the illness and the political-economi... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618660 Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618660 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618659&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18074903%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lester RJ Recent studies suggest that eating disorders are increasing in Mexico and that this seems to correspond with Mexico's push to modernization. In this respect, Mexico exemplifies the acculturation hypothesis of eating disorders, namely, that anorexia and bulimia are culture-bound syndromes tied to postindustrial capitalist development and neoliberalist values, and that their appearance elsewhere is indicative of acculturation to those values. Available evidence for this claim, however, is often problematic. On the basis of five years of comparative fieldwork in eating disorder clinics in Mexico City and a small Midwestern city in the United States, I reframe this as an ethnographic question by examining how specific clinical practices at each site entangle global diagn... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618659 Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618659 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618658&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D18074904%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Trnka S Medical personnel in public clinics in Fiji routinely contend that state-funded medical resources are misallocated on patients who complain of, but do not actually experience, physical pain. Frequently, these patients are identified as being Indo-Fijian women (i.e., women of South Asian origin in Fiji). In this article, I examine clinical interactions between medical staff and female Indo-Fijian patients to demonstrate how "real" and 'unreal' pain are distinguished in the clinical setting and to indicate some of the roles clinical encounters play in community processes that ascribe alternative meanings to physical pain. Focusing on how both physicians and women patients foster certain interpretations of physical pain over others, I argue that the category of 'unreal' p... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618658 Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618658 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618666&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17937248%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Inhorn MC PMID: 17937248 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618666 Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618666 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618665&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17937249%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lock M, Freeman J, Chilibeck G, Beveridge B, Padolsky M Drawing on an assumption of the co-construction of the material and the social, late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD) is used as an illustrative example to assess claims for an emergent figure of the "individual genetically at risk." Current medical understanding of the genetics of AD is discussed, followed by a summary of media and AD society materials that reveal an absence of gene hype in connection with this disease. Excerpts from interviews with first-degree relatives of patients diagnosed with AD follow. Interviewees hold complex theories of causation. After genetic testing they exhibit few if any subjective changes in embodied identity or lifestyle. Family history is regarded by interviewees as a better indicator of ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618665 Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618665 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618664&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17937250%26dopt%3DAbstract This article offers an ethnographic exploration of the spectrum of practices relating to sexual coercion and rape among young people in a township in the former Transkei region of South Africa. Contextualizing meanings of sexual coercion within local youth sexual culture, the article considers two emic categories associated with sex that is "forced": ukulala ngekani: "to sleep with by force" or ukunyanzela: "to force," both usually used to describe episodes occurring within sexual partnerships; and ukudlwengula, used to describe rape by a nonpartner or stranger. The article discusses the semantic content of and differences between these two key categories, demonstrating that encounters described as "forced sex" encompass not only various forms of sexual coercion but also, particularly in t... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618664 Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618664 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618663&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17937251%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Darby R, Svoboda JS In this article, we offer a critical examination of the tendency to segregate discussion of surgical alterations to the male and female genitals into separate compartments--the first known as circumcision, the second as genital mutilation. We argue that this fundamental problem of definition underlies the considerable controversy surrounding these procedures when carried out on minors, and that it hinders objective discussion of the alleged benefits, harms, and risks. We explore the variable effects of male and female genital surgeries, and we propose a scale of damage for male circumcision to complement the World Health Organization's categorization of female genital mutilation. The origins of the double standard identified are placed in historical perspec... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618663 Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618663 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618662&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17937252%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Antelius E In this article, I consider narratives told within a clinical setting. I argue that personnel in a day center for people with acquired brain damage are constantly involved in narrating about the disabled participants. The negotiation of who the participant is, and foremost will be, is in constant negotiation in regard to issues of hope. I further argue that hope is a meaning-making process and, as such, it has been defined as crucially connected to time. Hope has been said to enable a connection between the present and the future, because action taken in the present could bring about (positive) change in the future. However, I show that hope, in relation to narratives told about people with severe disabilities that are considered "incurable," must be understood with... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618662 Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618662 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618661&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17937253%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: PMID: 17937253 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618661 Sat, 01 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618661 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618672&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17601081%26dopt%3DAbstract This article is about new reproductive technologies, maternal anxieties, and existential uncertainties. It explores the question of why pregnant women in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, have become avid consumers of obstetrical ultrasound scanning even while expressing profound doubts regarding the reliability and safety of this new technology of pregnancy. Through a phenomenological analysis of the social production of women's sense of reproductive risks and uncertainties, the article shows how Hanoian women's paradoxical stances toward ultrasound imaging can be explained through a consideration of embodied and historically generated experiences within everyday local worlds. The article argues that the "scientific stories" of fetal well-being and normality that are produced through ultrasonogra... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618672 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618672 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618671&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17601082%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Leonard L, Greene JL, Erbelding E In this article we work the tensions between the way clinical medicine and public health necessarily construct the problem of "repetition" in the context of a sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinic and the ways patients narrate their illness experiences. This tension-between clinical and epidemiological exigencies and the messiness of lived experience-is a recurring theme of work conducted at the intersections of epidemiology, anthropology, and clinical medicine. Clinically, repeated infections are a threat to the individual body and to "normal" biological processes like reproduction. From a public health perspective, "repeaters" are imagined to be part of a "core group" that keeps infections in circulation, endangering the social body. Yet... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618671 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618671 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618670&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17601083%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Quinlan MB, Quinlan RJ Herbal medicine is the first response to illness in rural Dominica. Every adult knows several "bush" medicines, and knowledge varies from person to person. Anthropological convention suggests that modernization generally weakens traditional knowledge. We examine the effects of commercial occupation, consumerism, education, parenthood, age, and gender on the number of medicinal plants freelisted by individuals. All six predictors are associated with bush medical knowledge in bivariate analyses. Contrary to predictions, commercial occupation and consumerism are positively associated with herbal knowledge. Gender, age, occupation, and education are significant predictors in multivariate analysis. Women tend to recall more plants than do men. Education is ne... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618670 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618670 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618669&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17601084%26dopt%3DAbstract This article addresses issues of vulnerability and distress through an analysis of the relationship between social support networks and traumatic stress in a Q'eqchi' refugee community in southern Mexico. The sociopolitical violence, forced displacement, and encampment of Guatemalan Mayan populations resulted in the breakdown and dispersal of kin and community groups, leaving many Q'eqchi' women with weakened social support networks. Research involving testimonial interviews and traumatic stress and social support questionnaires revealed that Q'eqchi' refugee women with weak natal kin social support networks reported greater feelings of distress and symptoms of traumatic stress than did women with strong networks. In particular, a condition identified as muchkej emerged as one of the most ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618669 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618669 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618668&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17601085%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Wendland CL The philosophy of "evidence-based medicine"--basing medical decisions on evidence from randomized controlled trials and other forms of aggregate data rather than on clinical experience or expert opinion--has swept U.S. medical practice in recent years. Obstetricians justify recent increases in the use of cesarean section, and dramatic decreases in vaginal birth following previous cesarean, as evidence-based obstetrical practice. Analysis of pivotal "evidence" supporting cesarean demonstrates that the data are a product of its social milieu: The mother's body disappears from analytical view; images of fetal safety are marketing tools; technology magically wards off the unpredictability and danger of birth. These changes in practice have profound implications for mat... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618668 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618668 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618667&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17601086%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Children, who are vulnerable at the start of existence, are a concern shared by nations and cultures. The importance of children's conditions has led 192 out of 194 countries to ratify the UN General Assembly's Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United States has not yet ratified the convention, despite having exercised influence on the drafting of its provisions. Given the global importance of nurturing and protecting children, the Society for Medical Anthropology strongly and emphatically supports that the convention be ratified, and that the U.S. government submit the convention for approval by the U.S. Senate. PMID: 17601086 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618667 Fri, 01 Jun 2007 04:00:00 +0100 1618667 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618678&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17405695%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Erickson BE Environmental protection and public health agencies in the United States and elsewhere label radioactive radon gas a toxic environmental hazard and a major cause of lung cancer. Paradoxically, in Europe and Japan radon gas is also used as an analgesic and anti-inflammatory, as one choice in the spectrum of conventional medical care. Although it is possible to find radon therapy in the United States, it exists only as an unconventional practice in Montana "radon health mines." In this article, I examine the use of radon therapy by Americans despite intensive public health education media campaigns. Using the notion of explanatory models as an analytical framework, I argue that American health mine clients adjust or replace "toxic models" of radon with new kinds of e... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618678 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618678 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618677&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17405696%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Hagen EH, Barrett HC Psychiatry faces an internal contradiction in that it regards mild sadness and low mood as normal emotions, yet when these emotions are directed toward a new infant, it regards them as abnormal. We apply parental investment theory, a widely used framework from evolutionary biology, to maternal perinatal emotions, arguing that negative emotions directed toward a new infant could serve an important evolved function. If so, then under some definitions of psychiatric disorder, these emotions are not disorders. We investigate the applicability of parental investment theory to maternal postpartum emotions among Shuar mothers. Shuar mothers' conceptions of perinatal sadness closely match predictions of parental investment theory. PMID: 17405696 [PubMed - inde... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618677 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618677 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618676&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17405697%26dopt%3DAbstract Herbalism, home gardens, and hybridization: Wõthïhã medicine and cultural change. Med Anthropol Q. 2007 Mar;21(1):41-63 Authors: Heckler SL Using the example of the Wõthïhã of the Manapiare River Valley, Amazonas State, Venezuela, I challenge the image of the indigenous Amazonian as an expert in herbalism. I argue that the observed absence of medicinal plant use in early Wõthïhã ethnography, rather than reflecting researcher oversight, reflects the centrality of shamanism. According to Wõthïhã shamanic cosmology, herbal medicines, while useful to relieve symptoms and treat minor injuries, fail to address the underlying cause of illness. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, I find that as the rol... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618676 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618676 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618675&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17405698%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Gottschang SZ Urban Chinese women in the 1990s formulated their infant-feeding decisions in the context of a society undergoing radical transformation as the nation moved from a centrally planned socialist economy to a global, market-oriented one. Narratives of new mothers in Beijing in the 1990s provide insights into the multiple forces that shaped their infant-feeding practices. These personal histories also illustrate the limitations of multilateral breast-feeding programs that emphasize breast-feeding as a natural interaction between mother and infant. The cases I present here demonstrate instead that the material, bodily manifestations of breast-feeding require nursing mothers to continually renegotiate relations with husbands, coworkers, and family. Chinese women's accou... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618675 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618675 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618674&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17405699%26dopt%3DAbstract This article discusses a culturally specific response to traumatic events: orthostatic panic attacks among Vietnamese refugees. We compared the rate and severity of orthostatic panic as well as the rates and severity of associated flashbacks a month before and a month after September 11, 2001. After that date, the rate and severity of orthostatic panic greatly increased, as did the rate and severity of associated flashbacks. The central role of orthostatic panic as a response to traumatic events is illustrated through a patient's vignette. An explanation of why September 11 so profoundly influenced this population is adduced, including an explanation of why it resulted in considerable worsening of orthostatic panic. PMID: 17405699 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthrop... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618674 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618674 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618673&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17405700%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Rashid SF I carried out ethnographic fieldwork among 153 married adolescent girls, aged 15-19, in a Dhaka slum from December 2001 to January 2003, including 50 in-depth interviews and eight case studies. I also held discussions with family and community members. In this article, I focus on popular understandings of vaginal discharge being caused by durbolota (weakness) and chinta rog (worry illness), as mentioned by young women. Eighty-eight young women reported that they had experienced white discharge, blaming it on a number of factors such as stress and financial hardships, tensions in the household, marital instability, hunger anxiety, and reproductive burdens. For married adolescent women in the urban slum, white discharge has many levels of meaning linked to the broader ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618673 Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 +0100 1618673 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618684&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225653%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Daley CM, James AS, Barnoskie RS, Segraves M, Schupbach R, Choi WS Tobacco has long held spiritual significance to Native people of North America but, because of recreational use, it has become a health risk relatively recently. More Native people smoke than any other ethnic group (41 percent vs. 24 percent in whites and blacks), and death rates caused by tobacco-related diseases are disproportionately high. However, no tested, culturally tailored smoking cessation programs exist for this group. We used a critical-interpretive framework to understand the meaning of tobacco and the feasibility of smoking cessation interventions in a pan-tribal population. In June 2004, the University of Kansas Medical Center (KUMC) and the Oklahoma Area Indian Health Service (IHS) collaborated ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618684 Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618684 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618683&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225654%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Ivry T In this article, I explore the reluctance of Japanese ob-gyns to discuss prenatal diagnosis (PND) tests with pregnant women. The analysis focuses on the culturally specific ways in which ob-gyns formulate their cautiousness and criticism toward PND while invoking a local moral economy. Analyzing ob-gyns' accounts, I show how the ambiguities of PND are constituted in a specific moment in Japanese culture, history, disability politics, and national reproductive policies and are formulated through local paradigms of thinking about pregnant women, their fetuses, and the process of becoming a person in Japanese society. Finally, I show how PND in Japan is pushed to a "back-stage" realm in which the diagnosis for fetal anomalies is practiced in secrecy. PMID: 17225654 [Pu... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618683 Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618683 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618682&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225655%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Hashiloni-Dolev Y In this article, I report findings from a comparative study of Israeli and German genetic counselors. Specifically, it concerns counselors' attitudes and risk assessments relating to prenatal diagnosis of sex chromosome anomalies (SCAs) such as Klinefelter and Turner syndromes. Data collected through in-depth interviews with counselors in both countries (N = 32) are presented, and the types of claims experts deploy in their personal and professional estimation of the risks involved in SCAs are analyzed. The article concludes by suggesting that the counselors rhetoric concerning SCAs, whose major manifestation is the future infertility of the unborn child as well as their estimations of the related risks, should be situated in a broader cultural context, that ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618682 Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618682 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618681&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225656%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Chapman RR In this article, I examine pregnancy narratives and patterns of reproductive health seeking among women of fertile age in central Mozambique. I map the interplay between gendered economic marginalization, maternal risk perceptions, and pregnancy management strategies. By interpreting my data in light of Shona illness theories, I illuminate the ways that embodied experiences of reproductive vulnerability, risk perceptions, and social inequalities are linked: women attribute the most serious maternal complications to human- or spirit-induced reproductive threats of witchcraft and sorcery. This construction of reproductive vulnerability as social threats related to material and social competition significantly influences prenatal health seeking. Data reveal the structu... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618681 Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618681 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618680&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225657%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Johansen RE The focus of this article is on Norwegian health care workers' experience and management of birth care of women who have undergone infibulation. Because infibulation is the most extensive form of female genital cutting, infibulated women experience a higher risk of birth complications, and health workers generally experience delivery care for this group as challenging. Infibulated women, who come from recently arrived immigrant groups, are a challenge to the predominant Norwegian birth philosophy of "natural childbirth" and the positive evaluation of everything considered natural. The challenges relate to a mixture of technical know-how and a complex set of interpretations of central cultural elements of gender, nature, health, and gender equity. The findings sugge... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618680 Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618680 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618679&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D17225658%26dopt%3DAbstract This article explores the relationship between childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and later HIV risk. It draws on qualitative, in-depth interviews with 40 women who either used crack or engaged in commercial sex work in the greater metropolitan area of San Salvador, El Salvador, 28 of whom experienced CSA. Although the relationship between CSA and later HIV risk has been clearly demonstrated, the processes that lead women who have experienced CSA to experience HIV risk are unclear. The theoretical model presented here incorporates the psychological effects of CSA, particularly stigmatization, as well as its social consequences and the larger context of poverty in which these women live. The meanings women draw from past abuse experiences and their rationale for choices made help explain the asso... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618679 Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618679 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618690&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16937618%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Kunitz SJ In this article, I describe changes in patterns of alcohol use and abuse among Navajo Indians from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s. The prevalence of alcohol dependence continues to be higher than in the general U.S. population, but remission is also common, as it was in the 1960s and previously. Men have substantially higher rates of alcohol dependence than women. The former engage in heavy drinking largely in response to the heavy drinking of those around them. The latter drink excessively largely as a response to psychiatric disorders, depression, and abuse by a partner or husband. As increasing numbers of people have moved to reservation and border towns, a youth culture has developed in which alcohol use is initiated by teenagers with their peers rather than, as... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618690 Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618690 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618689&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16937619%26dopt%3DAbstract This article is an examination of the FDA hearing on a proposal to permit nonprescription access to the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B. Participants debated the drug's impact on female and young adult sexuality, illustrating how the rhetoric over disciplining pharmaceutical use in the American public is a displaced language for talking about disciplining women's and girls' sexuality. Debate over Plan B also focused on its mechanism of action and whether or not it was abortifacient, revealing a medical technology characterized not only by moral but also by marked scientific ambiguity. The scientific framing of the politics of emergency contraception is testament to the powerful authority of biomedicine to narrate and thus produce ideologies of bodies (individual, embryonic, social, and... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618689 Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618689 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618688&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16937620%26dopt%3DAbstract This article narrates how Minah Karan, as the former antihero of development, was reconstituted in the 1990s, with the government's labeling of factories as "high-risk settings" for HIV/AIDS. This is an ethnoetiology based not on any evidential epidemiological data but on the racial and gendered "mixing" that transpires behind factory walls: a fear that the "mixing of the sexes" means ipso facto "sexual mixing" among the races. The article demonstrates how importation of the high-risk label articulates at the local level the new and contested linkages, economic, religious, and scientific, constitutive of globalization. The pragmatic nature and imperatives of this high-risk process are discerned in factory women's accounts of how they negotiate the interactional imperatives of factory work,... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618688 Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618688 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618687&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16937621%26dopt%3DAbstract This article summarizes a dozen major messages about women's health that emerge from the ethnographic literature, now consisting of more than 150 volumes. These volumes are listed in the article, and some primary examples are described as representative of anthropology's contribution to knowledge production in women's health. PMID: 16937621 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618687 Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618687 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618686&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16937622%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Henry D Drawing on ethnographic research conducted along the Sierra Leone-Guinea border during wartime, this article explores the contested nature of the body and bodily illness during times of spectacular political violence. For both perpetrators and survivors of conflict, the body and bodily illness became tools over which each sought to control definitions of Self and identity. Finally, the article considers emic interpretations and contested meanings of the local illness hypertension, or haypatensi, that occurred among the displaced. I document how discussions of haypatensi allowed horrific subjective experiences to become mediated, enabling conflict survivors to understand and express the pain of their trauma and vulnerability, and begin recourse toward reestablishing ord... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618686 Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618686 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618685&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16937623%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Tapias M In this article, I take the embodied manifestations of distress across generations as the lens from which to illustrate the subtle articulations between the political restructuring of the Bolivian state and the private anxieties women experience under enduring political and economic instability. Emotions such as rage and sorrow generated by economic hardship, domestic violence, and social conflict played a fundamental role in how market- and working-class women perceived not only their own health problems but also many of the health problems that affected their infants. Mother's bodies and emotions are seen as the vectors through which gestating babies and breastfeeding infants develop transient and enduring ailments and debility. PMID: 16937623 [PubMed - indexed ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618685 Fri, 01 Sep 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618685 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618695&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16770908%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines what is at stake for blood donors in the circulation of blood through both the physical and the social bodies in China today. I argue that public health and social policy solutions require consideration of the symbolic meanings of blood and the body, kin relations, and gift exchange. China's HIV-contaminated blood procurement crisis demands a critical reexamination of the hidden processes embedded in a "circulatory system" that has inseparably bound the "gift of life" and a "commodity of death". PMID: 16770908 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618695 Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618695 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618694&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16770909%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Bezdek M, Spicer P In this article, we examine how American Indian individuals with a history of alcohol dependence have been able to maintain their abstinence despite strong pressures to return to drinking. This work builds on close collaboration with individual tribal members who have resolved their problems with alcohol and community-based service providers to develop open-ended qualitative interviews. Using these, we explored how former drinkers respond to the twin challenges raised by their former drinking associates and strong feelings that emerge when alcohol is no longer an option for coping with life's difficulties. The resolution of these challenges is central to abstinence, given the strong ties between drinking and sociality in some American Indian communities (inc... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618694 Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618694 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618693&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16770910%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Yount KM, Carrera JS In African populations practicing female genital cutting (FGC), beliefs exist that these procedures enhance reproduction and that their medicalization may diminish adverse effects, yet available findings are mixed in part for methodological reasons. We use data from a representative sample of ever-married women aged 17-55 years in Minya, Egypt, to examine the effects of type of FGC and type of circumciser on a woman's risks of primary infertility and pregnancy loss. Contrary to previous studies in Egypt, neither type of circumcision nor type of circumciser is associated with adverse fertility outcomes among circumcised women in Minya. PMID: 16770910 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618693 Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618693 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618692&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16770911%26dopt%3DAbstract This article discusses the results of a three-year ethnographic study of persons with cystic fibrosis (CF) who undergo double-lung transplant. It draws on interviews with a difficult-to-access patient group, adult CF sufferers, and investigates their dilemmas with regard to having or not having a double-lung transplant. It situates their decisions within a complex framework: the denial of death and disability in technological modernity, the consequent emphasis on cure and saving life at any cost, rather than the management of chronic illness, the extent to which health and illness constitute identity, and the problems of CF patients conceiving their life narrative when life will be short. This framework produces two key questions: Do patient beliefs in the progress narratives of medicine o... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618692 Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618692 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618691&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16770912%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Macdonald M In this article, I examine the meaning of natural bodies and natural births in contemporary midwifery in Canada and explore the impact of these central concepts on the embodied experiences of pregnant and birthing women. The ideal of a natural birth has been used as a successful rhetorical strategy in scholarly and popular feminist works on childbirth to counter and critique the predominant biomedical or "technocratic" model of the pregnant and birthing body as inherently problematic and potentially dangerous to the fetus. Contemporary Canadian midwifery--which only as recently as 1994 made a historic transition from a grassroots social movement to a full profession within the public health care system--continues to work discursively through the idiom of nature to ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618691 Thu, 01 Jun 2006 04:00:00 +0100 1618691 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618702&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612990%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Inhorn MC, Sargent CF PMID: 16612990 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618702 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618702 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618701&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612991%26dopt%3DAbstract This article uses comparative, statistical methods to show that this representation is empirically wrong, at least in West Africa. Although religion strongly inflects reproductive practice, its effects are not constant across different communities. In West African countries with Muslim majorities, Muslim fertility is lower than that of their non-Muslim conationals; in countries where Muslims are in the minority, their apparently higher reproductive rates converge to those of the majority when levels of education and urban residence are taken into account. A similar pattern holds for infant mortality. By contrast, in all seven countries, Muslim women are more likely to report that their most recent child was wanted. The article concludes with a discussion of the relationship between autonom... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618701 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618701 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618700&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612992%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Sargent CF Approximately 37 thousand Malians currently reside in France as part of the West African diaspora. Primarily Muslim, both women and men confront challenges to their understandings of Islamic prohibitions and expectations, especially those addressing conjugal relations and reproduction. Biomedical policies generate marital conflicts and pose health dilemmas for women who face family and community pressures to reproduce but biomedical encouragement to limit childbearing. For many women, contraception represents a reprieve from repeated pregnancies and fatigue in spite of resistance from those who contest women's reproductive decisions as antithetical to Islam. French social workers play a particularly controversial role by introducing women to a discourse of women's r... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618700 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618700 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618699&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612993%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Tober DM, Taghdisi MH, Jalali M In the West it is often assumed that religion (esp. Islam) and contraception are mutually exclusive. Yet, the Islamic Republic of Iran has one of the most successful family-planning programs in the developing world, and is often looked to as a potential model for other Muslim countries. Although Iran's family-planning program has been extremely successful among Iranians, it has been far less successful among Afghan refugees and other ethnic groups. Afghans and Iranians both seek services in Iran's public health sector for family health care, treatment of infectious disease, and childhood vaccinations. On these occasions, all adult married patients are strongly encouraged to use family planning to reduce the number of offspring. In this article, ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618699 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618699 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618698&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612994%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Keshavjee S The bleeding of infants via the skin (pile) and the roof of the mouth (qüm) is practiced in Badakhshan, the easternmost province of Tajikistan. Like folk practices elsewhere, pilé and qüm exist at the interstices of modern society and reflect a complex religious, historical, and social response to poverty, marginality, and the global processes associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In this article, I attempt to move beyond an ethnomedical analysis by examining these bloodletting practices in the context of their contemporary meaning, as a moral response to suffering and to the social changes that have taken place in the post-Soviet period. PMID: 16612994 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618698 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618698 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618697&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612995%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Inhorn MC In the Sunni Muslim world, religious mandates prohibit both adoption and gamete donation as solutions to infertility, including in the aftermath of in vitro fertilization (IVF) failures. However, both of these options are now available in two Middle Eastern countries with significant Shi'ite Muslim populations (Iran and Lebanon). On the basis of fieldwork in multisectarian Lebanon, I examine in this article attitudes toward both adoption and gamete donation among childless Muslim men who are undertaking IVF with their wives. No matter the religious sect, most Muslim men in Lebanon continue to resist both adoption and gamete donation, arguing that such a child "won't be my son". However, against all odds, some Muslim men are considering and undertaking these alternati... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618697 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618697 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618696&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16612996%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Gruenbaum E Ethnographic research in seven rural Sudanese communities in 2004 demonstrates the deep association between infibulation and expectations for successful male sexual response, reinforced by aesthetic values about the preferred body form for females. In contrast, women conceive of the uninfibulated body as lacking in both propriety and beauty, as well as making a woman less able to please a husband sexually. Female sexual response has only recently begun to be discussed in the context of change efforts to end female genital cutting. PMID: 16612996 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618696 Wed, 01 Mar 2006 05:00:00 +0100 1618696 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618706&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16435645%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Marshall M Tobacco use--especially smoking industrially manufactured cigarettes--kills nearly 5 million people annually and is the leading preventable cause of death worldwide. Tobacco is a widely used global commodity embedded in cultural meanings, and its consumption involves a set of learned, patterned social behaviors. Seemingly, then, tobacco offers a most appealing anthropological research topic, yet its study has been relatively ignored by medical anthropologists when compared to research on alcoholic beverages and illegal drugs. To help fill this gap, this article sketches the historical background of tobacco in Micronesia, presents the results of a cross-sectional smoking survey from Namoluk Atoll, and describes contemporary smoking patterns and locally understood sym... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618706 Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618706 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618705&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16435646%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lichtenstein B, Schwebke JR This pilot study sought information on African American men's preferences for partner notification methods for a common sexually transmitted infection called trichomoniasis. Two focus groups of African American men were convened at a public STI clinic where they were being treated for trichomoniasis. The groups identified a sexual hierarchy in men's preferences for methods of partner notification. The hierarchy consisted of main men (Cake Daddies), second men (Second Hitters), and third or fourth men (Third Players), with placement depending on age, income, and social status. Health department employees affirmed the existence of a sexual hierarchy in a separate focus group. Sexual and economic bartering formed the basis of the hierarchy, and the sec... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618705 Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618705 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618704&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16435647%26dopt%3DAbstract This article considers the question of female genital practices at the hands of health workers in western Kenya. Recent articles in Medical Anthropology Quarterly have critically engaged with the biomedical arguments condemning such practices. This article studies the case of medicalized circumcision in which biomedical concerns over health risks have become incorporated in their vernacular practice. Although some suggest that medicalization may provide a harm-reduction strategy to the abandonment of the practice, research in one region challenges this suggestion. It argues that changing and conflicting ideologies of gender and sexuality have led young women to seek their own meaning through medicalized practice. Moreover, attributing this practice to financial motivations of health worker... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618704 Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618704 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618703&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16435648%26dopt%3DAbstract This article looks at HIV prevention projects in which established stigmatized and stigmatizing roles were actively reversed and manipulated in pursuit of HIV harm reduction. In two Norwegian projects, sex workers and drug users carried out harm-reduction activities with other drug users and sex workers. Although HIV-related harm reduction was the aim of the projects, termination or reduction of drug use or sex work was not. Such changes nevertheless occurred among the sex workers and drug users who took active part in the project. The article considers these changes in order to reflect on the meanings and roles of participation in HIV prevention work. In particular, the discussion theorizes on possible ways in which alteration of roles and subject positions may produce self-reflective eff... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618703 Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618703 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618711&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16222961%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Barnes LL By its very definition, efficacy's meanings remain fluid, their particularities contingent on context. The change seen as significant may occur on a symbolic level or through the removal of physical symptoms. It may address conditions of a social body. Some discussions differentiate between "healing" and "curing." Many of these meanings surface when examining what efficacy means in the practice of acupuncture in the United States. This complex phenomenon is possible largely because acupuncture draws on the qi paradigm on the one hand, allowing for the most ephemeral dimensions of experience to be included in considerations of efficacy. On the other hand, in the most material sense, acupuncture is also susceptible to being conceptualized as a device, independent of th... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618711 Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618711 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618710&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16222962%26dopt%3DAbstract This article adds to this literature through analysis of an NICHD-funded collaborative research effort in women's health carried out in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China. The research involved a feasibility study for an eventual clinical trial comparing Tibetan medicine with misoprostol for preventing postpartum hemorrhage in delivering women. It explores strategies of negotiation and translation in and around notions of the scientific method, informed consent procedures, randomization, blinding, placebo, and concepts of medical standardization. PMID: 16222962 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618710 Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618710 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618709&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16222963%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Shaw SJ Over the last 20 years, the concept of culturally appropriate health care has been gradually gaining popularity in medicine and public health. In calling for health care that is culturally appropriate, minority groups seek political recognition of often racialized constructions of cultural difference as they intervene in health care planning and organization. Based on interview narratives from people involved in community organizing to establish a federally funded community health center in a mid-size New England city, I chart the emergence of a language of "culturally appropriate health care" in language used to justify the need for a health center. An identity model of recognition underlies the call for ethnic resemblance between patient and provider seen in many cul... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618709 Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618709 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618708&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16222964%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: White C Patient explanatory models of Hansen's disease (leprosy) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, tend to be syntheses of folk models of illness and health, biomedical models to which patients are exposed at different stages in the treatment process, and individual patient experiences of illness. The sensitive presentation of biomedical information about Hansen's disease to patients has the potential to increase adherence to treatment programs and increase patient confidence in the biomedical system. Conversely, withholding or poor presentation of biomedical information can create misunderstanding and confusion for patients. In this article, I explore the ways in which people who are affected by Hansen's disease in Rio de Janeiro learn about different aspects of their illness and it... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618708 Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618708 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618707&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D16222965%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Fitzgerald MH, Williamson P, Russell C, Manor D Cultural competence is used (often implicitly) to make decisions in human service settings. When therapists make decisions about whether or not a particular service will be offered, they place themselves in a position where their own competence can be judged. Using narrative data on independence and the elderly, we apply Edgerton's idea of the cloak of competence to demonstrate this doubling effect. PMID: 16222965 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618707 Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618707 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618716&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15974324%26dopt%3DAbstract This article explores dominant discourses surrounding male and female genital cutting. Over a similar period of time, these genital operations have separately been subjected to scrutiny and criticism. However, although critiques of female circumcision have been widely taken up, general public opinion toward male circumcision remains indifferent. This difference cannot merely be explained by the natural attributes and effects of these practices. Rather, attitudes toward genital cutting reflect historically and culturally specific understandings of the human body. In particular, I suggest that certain problematic understandings of male and female sexuality are deeply implicated in the dominant Western discourses on genital surgery. PMID: 15974324 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: M... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618716 Wed, 01 Jun 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618716 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618715&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15974325%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Roche B, Neaigus A, Miller M Storytelling has a strong tradition in inner-city American communities. In this article, we examine patterns of storytelling among a sample of drug-using women from New York City who engage in street-based sex work. We consider two particular formats of storytelling for analysis: "street smarts" and "urban myths." Street smarts are stories of survival, and urban myths are compilations of street legends spread by word of mouth. The narratives are filled with tales of extreme risk across situations. The women used the stories to delineate the boundaries of risk as well as to rationalize risks they deemed to be inevitable but temporary in their lives. Few of the women capitalized on the greater instructive quality of the stories toward increased risk ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618715 Wed, 01 Jun 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618715 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618714&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15974326%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Schoenberg NE, Drew EM, Stoller EP, Kart CS In response to the serious toll diabetes takes on health and resources, researchers increasingly are examining physical and psychological pathways that affect and are affected by diabetes, including stress. Although biomedical researchers and practitioners are beginning to recognize the association between stress and diabetes onset and management, laypersons have long-standing and extensive insights into the multiple ways in which stress is associated with the diabetes disease process. In this article, we examine lay perspectives on stress and diabetes among a multiethnic sample of 80 adults. Participants suggest varying arenas in which stress intersects with diabetes, including stress as implicated in the origin of diabetes, as a th... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618714 Wed, 01 Jun 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618714 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618713&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15974327%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines how medical officials challenge the respectable mothering practices of homebirthers by linking them with women they deem pathological--child abusers, negligent mothers, and drug users--and placing them outside the cadre of "normal" American mothers who acknowledge the "logical" and "natural" superiority of biomedical childbirth practices. I also address homebirth mothers' responses, which assert that their political advocacy for midwives is a respectable mothering practice because they are responsible citizens who desire what they deem the best care for their children. PMID: 15974327 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618713 Wed, 01 Jun 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618713 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618712&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15974328%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines the biocultural dynamics of social discrimination and physical disfigurement among people with leprosy, or Hansen's disease (HD), in Banaras, northern India. Based on the narratives and observations ofpeople living in colony and street settings, I trace three destructive processes by which the social stigmata of leprosy become physically expressed. First, strategies of concealment further the progression and spread of HD through late detection and undertreatment. Second, the internalization of stigma can lead to bodily dissociation and injury through self-neglect. Finally, some people intentionally seek injuries under conditions of desperate poverty. As a result of such mortification processes, these people came to embody, quite literally, the prejudices that exacerba... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618712 Wed, 01 Jun 2005 04:00:00 +0100 1618712 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618722&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15789624%26dopt%3DAbstract This article serves as an introduction to a special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly that assesses the unintended consequences of this reform and its impact on providers and staff who work in clinics, physician offices, and emergency rooms where Medicaid patients are served. MMC fused state and corporate bureaucracies, creating a complex system where enrollment and access was difficult. The special issue focuses on providers' responses to these new structures, including ways in which staff buffer the impact of reform and the role of the discourses of medical necessity and accountability in shaping the way in which MMC functions. PMID: 15789624 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618722 Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618722 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618721&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15789625%26dopt%3DAbstract This article discusses enrollment issues in New Mexico's Medicaid managed care (MMC) system and seeks to illuminate reasons for persistent problems reported by workers and clients. It argues that between 1997 and 2000, the MMC and welfare reforms raised enrollment barriers by complicating and dehumanizing the system, thus "technically disenfranchising" workers and clients. Specifically, the new system increased the need for professional, in-person enrollment assistance precisely when the state decreased its provision of it. Some aspects of the State Child Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reforms indirectly aggravated those same problems, and though they also significantly lowered barriers in some areas, overall the new system was plagued with preexisting barriers as well as new, unmet need... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618721 Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618721 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618720&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15789626%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Boehm DA In this article, I examine the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on the delivery of Medicaid, specifically how the advent of Medicaid managed care (MMC) has been wrought with contradictions, placing increased burdens on primary safety-net organizations and impacting the many communities they serve. I argue that federally qualified health centers (FQHCs) operate as a primary safety net among safety-net providers, supporting and subsidizing New Mexico's MMC program financially and administratively. By presenting ethnographic data, I will demonstrate how FQHCs pay many of the hidden financial and institutional costs of the shift to managed care. Such findings uncover paradoxes inherent to neoliberal ideologies and privatization, raising questions about the effic... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618720 Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618720 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618719&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15789627%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Wagner WG The insertion of managed care into Medicaid services for the mentally ill has created contention about clinical decision making. At the center of this debate is the matter of what constitutes a medical necessity. Employing ethnographic methodology, this study examines utilization review (UR), the context in which decisions concerning the authorization of mental health care services are made. Interviews carried out in the study contrast ideological underpinnings of providers and advocates of the mentally ill, on the one hand, with employees and administrators of managed care institutions, on the other. The result is an exploration into the ways discourses surrounding the mental health care needs of New Mexico's Medicaid population are being constructed and are determi... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618719 Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618719 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618718&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15789628%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Willging CE I examine the provision of mental health services to Medicaid recipients in New Mexico to illustrate how managed care accountability models subvert the allocation of responsibility for delivering, monitoring, and improving care for the poor. The downward transfer of responsibility is a phenomenon emergent in this hierarchically organized system. I offer three examples to clarify the implications of accountability discourse. First, I problematize the public-private "partnership" between the state and its managed care contractors to illuminate the complexities of exacting state oversight in a medically underserved, rural setting. Second, I discuss the strategic deployment of accountability discourse by members of this partnership to limit use of expensive services by... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618718 Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618718 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618717&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15789629%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Nelson NL The articles in this special issue teach valuable lessons based on what happened in New Mexico with the shift to Medicaid managed care. By reframing these lessons in broader historical and cultural terms with reference to aid programs, we have the opportunity to learn a great deal more about the relationship between poverty, public policy, and ideology. Medicaid as a state and federal aid program in the United States and economic development programs as foreign aid provide useful analogies specifically because they exhibit a variety of parallel patterns. The increasing concatenation of corporate interests with state and nongovernmental interests in aid programs is ultimately producing a less centralized system of power and responsibility. This process of decentraliza... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618717 Tue, 01 Mar 2005 05:00:00 +0100 1618717 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618727&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15612408%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lane SD, Keefe RH, Rubinstein RA, Levandowski BA, Freedman M, Rosenthal A, Cibula DA, Czerwinski M Since 1996, state legislators, members of the U.S. Congress, and more recently President George W. Bush, have called for the protection of monogamous, heterosexual marriage and the promotion of marriage among poor women. The thrust of this policy making is directed at African American families, among which female headship doubled between 1965 and 1990. This doubling is temporally associated with enacting the legislation directed toward the War on Drugs, which resulted in a tripling of the African American prison population. In Syracuse, New York, the swelling African American population behind bars has resulted in a skewed sex ratio, in which women significantly outnumber men. Th... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618727 Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618727 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618726&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15612409%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Sankar P Biomedical ethics require that research subjects be aware that the drugs they take or procedures they undergo are designed to fulfill the conditions of the experiment and not to benefit a subject's health. This apparently straightforward distinction between research and treatment is a source of much controversy and misunderstanding. Ethicists have labeled this problem the "therapeutic misconception." This misconception and, more broadly, informed consent have been studied extensively. Nonetheless, the therapeutic misconception persists among research subjects. This paper argues that one factor overlooked in the persistence of the therapeutic misconception is the effect of the theoretical paradigm that guides the practice and analysis of informed consent. The paradigm ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618726 Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618726 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618725&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15612410%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Larsen JA The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creativ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618725 Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618725 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618724&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15612411%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Horton S This paper explores the public health system's differential construction of Mexican and Cuban immigrants' "deservingness" of citizenship benefits and its preparation of them for different roles in U.S. society. Civic institutions such as the public health care system are charged with inculcating normative behavior in immigrants and instilling in them different conceptions about their rights and responsibilities. Faced with limited resources under the implementation of Medicaid managed care, hospital administrators created new categories of "deserving" and "undeserving" immigrants based on neoliberal standards of individual responsibility and self-discipline. As a result, hospital policies construct different types of "cultural citizenship" for Cuban and Mexican immigr... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618724 Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618724 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618723&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15612412%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Spitzer DL Health care reform in Canadian hospitals has resulted in increased workloads and bureaucratization of patient care contributing to the development of a new economy of care. Interviews with nurses and visible (non-white) minority women who have given birth in institutions undergoing health care reform revealed that nurses felt compelled to avoid interactions with patients deemed too costly in terms of time. Overwhelmingly, these patients were members of culturally marginalized populations whose bodies were read by nurses as potentially problematic and time consuming. As their calls for assistance go unanswered, visible minority women complained of feeling invisible. Taken in context of historical and contemporary interethnic relations, these women regarded such avoid... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618723 Wed, 01 Dec 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618723 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618732&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15484965%26dopt%3DAbstract This article views reproductive health activism as a fruitful site for analyzing the cultural logics through which legitimate claims for women's needs become expressed and circumscribed. It begins from the observation that in the United States and Britain, reproductive health has been a key arena for feminist political claims and struggles for women's rights, bodily integrity, access to health care, and demands for authority in relations with experts. These concerns and struggles have not, however, emerged in all postsocialist contexts, and new activism in Russia reveals strikingly different agendas. Innovative groups of health providers seeking to increase women's access to birth control methods and safe sex, home birth opportunities, and improved health services work outside of feminist ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618732 Wed, 01 Sep 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618732 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618731&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15484966%26dopt%3DAbstract This article presents data from ethnographic interviews with 60 smokers, interviewed in high school and in follow-up interviews at age 21. Contrary to previous research, this study found little evidence for the sustained use of smoking as a weight-control strategy. In high school, smokers were no more likely than nonsmokers to be trying to lose weight. In the follow-up study, 85 percent of informants replied that they had never smoked as a way to control their weight. One-half of informants at age 21 believed that smoking as a weight-control strategy would be ineffective, while the other one-half had no idea whether it would work or not. Researchers need to exert caution in propagating the idea that smoking is commonly used as a conscious and sustained weight-control strategy among adolesc... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618731 Wed, 01 Sep 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618731 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618730&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15484967%26dopt%3DAbstract This article ethnographically explores one particular stage in the life cycle of pharmaceuticals: sales and marketing. Drawing on a range of sources-investigative journalism, medical ethics, and autoethnography--the author examines the day-to-day activities of pharmaceutical salespersons, or drug reps, during the 1990s. He describes in detail the pharmaceutical gift cycle, a three-way exchange network between doctors, salespersons, and patients and how this process of exchange is currently in a state of involution. This gift economy exists to generate prescriptions (scripts) and can mask and/or perpetuate risks and side effects for patients. With implications of pharmaceutical industry practices impacting everything from the personal-psychological to the global political economy, medical a... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618730 Wed, 01 Sep 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618730 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618729&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15484968%26dopt%3DAbstract This article presents an understanding of how Bangladeshis cope with madness in relation to two assumptions: that systems of knowledge and of power are coterminous, and that actors in medical encounters draw on incompatible and unequal bodies of knowledge-power I first offer a perspective on psychiatry, emotion, and discourse in Bangladesh as a society increasingly caught up in globalizing modernity. Then I present two types of data to illumine tensions between various attempts to control the fears associated with schizophrenia. The first is a set of exchanges in the advice column of a new popular psychiatry magazine in Bangladesh that inculcate new perspectives on self Those who write to the editors signal their fears of what might, in the end, be impossible to control. Answers from the p... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618729 Wed, 01 Sep 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618729 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618728&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15484969%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Markovic M, Manderson L, Quinn M The detection and successful treatment of cancers is dependent on timely presentation with abnormal and often subtle symptoms. In this article, we draw on research conducted with Australian immigrant women in 2001-02 who experienced delays in diagnosis of gynecological cancer. Data from in-depth interviews with women with gynecological cancer indicated a common trajectory of an "illness career" whereby the search for diagnosis was often painful and lengthy, either because women normalized the abnormal signs or because their experiences of bodily abnormality, pain, and dysfunction contrasted with medical explanations. This delay was sometimes exacerbated by structural barriers. As a result, diagnosis was often protracted, during which time women... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618728 Wed, 01 Sep 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618728 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618739&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272801%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Shuttleworth RP, Kasnitz D Joan Ablon has helped establish the anthropology of impairment-disability and significantly contributed to the role of anthropology in disability studies. In this article, we review the development of and situate Ablon's ethnographic research in the anthropology of impairment-disability. We then address various methodological issues in her work including her ethnographic approach, her grounding in action anthropology and her support for the development of the academic study of disability in anthropology and the careers of disabled anthropologists. The next section of the article examines Ablon's use of the notion of stigma, her understanding of community, and her engagement with disability rights. As examples of themes important to disability studies... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618739 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618739 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618738&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272802%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines the problem of male infertility in two Middle Eastern locales, Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon, where men may be at increased risk of male infertility because of environmental and behavioral factors. It is argued that male infertility may be particularly problematic for Middle Eastern men in their pronatalist societies; there, both virility and fertility are typically tied to manhood. Thus, male infertility is a potentially emasculating condition, surrounded by secrecy and stigma. Furthermore, the new reproductive technology called intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), designed specifically to overcome male infertility, may paradoxically create additional layers of stigma and secrecy, due to the complex moral and marital dilemmas associated with Islamic restricti... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618738 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618738 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618737&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272803%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Rebhun LA Despite its international image as a sexually free-spirited country, local attitudes toward morality of sexual behavior remain complex throughout Brazil, especially in rural areas and the conservative Northeast region. In addition, notwithstanding its official ideology of nonracism, African ancestry as judged through personal appearance (color) constitutes a significant social and economic disadvantage. Using Goffman's idea of "spoiled identity" as a starting point, I show how locals use sexual behavior as a multivocal symbol of moral status in women, and how spoiled sexual reputation interacts with other stigmatized statuses, especially color. I also consider how the acquisition of sexually stigmatized status jeopardizes women's well-being and that of their children... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618737 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618737 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618736&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272804%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lipson JG Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS), an intolerance to everyday chemical and biological substances in amounts that do not bother other people, is a medically contested condition. In addition to symptoms and the ongoing difficulties of living with this condition, this hidden and stigmatized disability strongly impacts social relationships and daily life. Based on an ethnographic study, this article introduces the context of MCS in terms of cultural themes, the media, and the economic power of industries that manufacture the products that make people with MCS sick. Participants' experiences with family members and friends, in work and school settings, and with physicians exemplify the difficulties of living with MCS. I dedicate this article to Joan Ablon, my professor ... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618736 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618736 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618735&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272805%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Schwartz NA Children with asthma living on the northern Mexico border suffer not only from the physical aspects of this condition, but also from the lack of a clear biomedical definition and treatment plan for the illness. An ethnographic study involving participant observation and focused interviews in Tijuana, Mexico, sought to understand the intersection of diagnostic uncertainties surrounding childhood asthma on the part of parents, particularly mothers, living in acute poverty. Environmental factors such as dust and insects in impoverished homes probably acted as asthma triggers among many of the children in the study. Furthermore, management of children's asthma took place not only in biomedical clinics, but also in homes, traditional medical settings, and pharmacies, wh... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618735 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618735 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618734&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272806%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Janes CR, Chuluundorj O Beginning in 1990, Mongolia, a former client state of what was then the Soviet Union, undertook liberal economic reforms. These came as a great shock to Mongolia and Mongolians, and resulted in food shortages, reports of famine, widespread unemployment, and a collapse of public health and health care. Although economic conditions have stabilized in recent years, unemployment and poverty are still at disturbingly high levels. One important consequence of the transition has been the transformation of the rural, primarily pastoral, economy. With de-collectivization, herding households have been thrown into a highly insecure subsistence mode of production, and, as a consequence, have become vulnerable to local fluctuations in rainfall and availability and q... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618734 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618734 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618733&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15272807%26dopt%3DAbstract This article explores the difficulties people experience in seeking health care through the health care "safety net," which provides most of the health care that uninsured people receive, and critiques the gaps, inconsistencies, and failures of such care. In research with 176 African Americans and Latinos who had no health insurance, it was found that they delay seeking care because of cost, do without medications, have negative views of safety net health care, and experience discrimination. As a consequence of dissatisfaction with safety net care, avoidance of the health care system was commonplace. It is concluded that safety net health care facilitates the development of unhealthy practices, such as delays in seeking care. The inadequacy of safety net health care is thus injurious to pe... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618733 Tue, 01 Jun 2004 04:00:00 +0100 1618733 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618743&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15098425%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Baer RD, Weller SC, Garcia de Alba Garcia J, Salcedo Rocha AL The goal of this research was to explore differences between lay and professional explanatory models both within and between two countries. We test which effect is stronger, country of residence or professional/lay status, in determining similarities and differences of explanatory models of AIDS. Interviews conducted in Guadalajara, Jalisco (Mexico) and the Edinburg-McAllen area of south Texas (United States) elicited explanatory models of AIDS. Two pairs of samples were interviewed: a physician and community sample in Mexico and a physician and community sample in the United States. Comparisons of the explanatory models indicated that there was a shared core model of AIDS across all four samples, but that physician... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618743 Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618743 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618742&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15098426%26dopt%3DAbstract This article reviews recent evidence about the value of obstetric ultrasound, summarizing debates and contradictions in research literature and practitioner guidelines. Pregnant women's interpretations of the significance of ultrasound are examined through multiple interviews with 34 study participants. We find that ultrasound has become an integral part of women's embodied experience of pregnancy, with its own pleasures and dilemmas. The increasing use of the technology has augmented the role of scientific biomedicine in the government of pregnancy. This must be understood in the light of trends toward individualized risk management in which the pregnant woman increasingly takes responsibility for the successful outcome of the pregnancy, in a context where pregnancy is discursively constr... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618742 Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618742 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618741&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15098427%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Lemelson RB In a discussion of patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and/or Tourettes's Syndrome (TS), in Bali, Indonesia, traditional healing and psychiatric perspectives are used to highlight the power and weakness of each to treat these conditions. Given they are drawn from the same culture, should not indigenous explanatory models provide meaning and be more efficacious at relieving the suffering of people with OCD and TS-like symptoms? What if they provide an understandable meaning for patients but these meanings have no efficacy? Ethnographic data on Balinese models for illness are presented. Multiple data sources were used to frame the complex Balinese traditional healing systems. Forty patients were interviewed regarding their utilization of tradi... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618741 Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618741 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618740&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D15098428%26dopt%3DAbstract This article argues that the diffusion of SM techniques in Africa is not driven by demonstrated efficacy but is attributable to the promotion of privatization and free markets in the structural adjustment era across the region. The CSM experience in a central Mozambican community reveals the dangers of using the method at the expense of community dialogue and participation to confront the AIDS epidemic. The advertising campaign developed to sell condoms has clashed with Pentecostal and Independent Churches, now a majority of the population, that have expanded rapidly across the region spreading a contrasting message about sexuality and risky behavior. PMID: 15098428 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618740 Mon, 01 Mar 2004 05:00:00 +0100 1618740 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618747&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14716917%26dopt%3DAbstract This article provides the fullest examination of this new concept to date, including a review of relevant new literature and recent research finds concerning coinfection and synergistic interaction of diseases and social conditions at the biological and population levels. PMID: 14716917 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618747 Mon, 01 Dec 2003 05:00:00 +0100 1618747 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618746&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14716918%26dopt%3DAbstract This article questions the biomedical explanation of immigrant tuberculosis as being imported from immigrants' countries of origin. Illness narratives of illegal Chinese immigrants with tuberculosis detailing risks associated with migratory journeys are presented. The social and cultural nature of the concept of risk, as well as the adverse implication of biomedical identification of immigrants as being at higher risk of tuberculosis, are also discussed. The author concludes that the dominant biomedical explanation of immigrant tuberculosis could be modified with the incorporation of the migratory process as a risk factor. PMID: 14716918 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618746 Mon, 01 Dec 2003 05:00:00 +0100 1618746 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618745&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14716919%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Finerman R, Sackett R Home gardens are a pervasive component of Andean agricultural systems, but have been ignored in anthropological and agronomic research. Recent research in the indigenous community of Saraguro, Ecuador, employed a combination of in-depth interviews, free-listing, videotaped walk-throughs, and mapping to explore the role of home gardens, which are established and controlled by women. Findings reveal that, although gardens offer multiple benefits, they are overwhelmingly devoted to the cultivation of medicinal plants, operating as de facto medicine cabinets that supply women with most of the resources they need to treat family illnesses. Results also suggest that the natural history of home gardens mirrors transformations within the family, and that Saraguro... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618745 Mon, 01 Dec 2003 05:00:00 +0100 1618745 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618744&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D14716920%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines how a group of public health physicians in the urban Amazon values medicinal plant knowledge. As biomedical health care providers, physicians routinely draw on scientific plant knowledge. At the same time, as residents of the Amazon and health care providers to the poor, they are aware of and sometimes participate in local systems of plant knowledge. When discussing medicinal plant use, physicians repeatedly mention three themes: science, superstition, and biopiracy. The way in which physicians construct and negotiate these themes is part of the process of maintaining and legitimating their expertise and authority. This analysis finds that context is key to understanding whether, when, and why physicians value certain bodies of knowledge. Locally, in clinics, scientif... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618744 Mon, 01 Dec 2003 05:00:00 +0100 1618744 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618752&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12974200%26dopt%3DAbstract This article analyzes how Venezuelan public health officials collaborated with journalists in producing information about cholera in January-December 1991. It uses Michael Warner's (2002) observation that such public discourse involves a contradiction: it must project the image of reaching an actually existing public at the same time that it creates multiple publics as it circulates. The analysis explores the language ideologies that hide complex sets of practices, networks, and material conditions that shape how public discourses circulate. At the same time that epidemiologists targeted poor barrio residents, street vendors of food and drink, and indigenous people as being "at high risk," health education messages pictured women in well-equipped kitchens demonstrating cholera prevention m... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618752 Mon, 01 Sep 2003 04:00:00 +0100 1618752 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618751&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12974201%26dopt%3DAbstract This article explores the sources of authoritative knowledge that shaped single, white, middle-class women's unintentional pregnancies and child-bearing decisions throughout five reproductive eras. Women who terminated a pregnancy were most influenced by their own personal needs and circumstances. birth mothers' decisions were based on external sources of knowledge, such as their mothers, social workers, and social pressures. In contrast, single mothers based their decision on instincts and their religious or moral beliefs. Reproductive policies further constrained and significantly shaped women's experiences. The social stigma associated with these forms of stratified maternity suggests that categorizing pregnant women by their marital status, or births as out-of-wedlock, reproduces the s... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618751 Mon, 01 Sep 2003 04:00:00 +0100 1618751 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618750&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12974202%26dopt%3DAbstract This article examines a complex field of health factors in relation to historical processes and a system of medical pluralism. Rapid demographic and social changes over the past century have brought an accommodation of ancient medical beliefs to more recent germ-oriented principles. An enduring belief in the permeability of the body leads to an emphasis on moderation in personal conduct to prevent debilitation, whether by atmospheric insults, microbial infection, or modern-day miasmas such as pollution or additives in food. The idea of health itself is analyzed to show how biomedicine varies across societies and how historical processes have shaped contemporary cultural patterns and led to generational continuities and differences in beliefs and behaviors. This information may also improve... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618750 Mon, 01 Sep 2003 04:00:00 +0100 1618750 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618749&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12974203%26dopt%3DAbstract This study provides an empirical demonstration that children's ADHD symptoms can be, but need not always be, reported differently based on cultural models expecting behavioral differences. In this case, child's gender influences the way psychiatric symptoms are ascribed to them by some, but not all, groups of involved social actors. PMID: 12974203 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] (Source: Medical Anthropology Quarterly) Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618749 Mon, 01 Sep 2003 04:00:00 +0100 1618749 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1618748&cid=s_37718_46_f&fid=37718&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2Fentrez%2Fquery.fcgi%3Ftmpl%3DNoSidebarfile%26db%3DPubMed%26cmd%3DRetrieve%26list_uids%3D12974204%26dopt%3DAbstract Authors: Obermeyer CM This two-part article addresses questions that have arisen in current debates on the health consequences of female circumcision. The first part responds to a critique of a 1999 article and focuses on three major points: the role of research and advocacy in discussions of harmful effects, the sort of evidence that is appropriate for measuring health effects, and the way in which different disciplines--demography, epidemiology, and anthropology--are brought together to analyze data on health consequences. The second part of the article reviews published sources and provides an update on their results. It shows that few studies are appropriately designed to measure health effects, that circumcision is associated with significantly higher risks of a few well-defined c... Medical Anthropology Quarterly journals http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1618748 Mon, 01 Sep 2003 04:00:00 +0100 1618748