Practicing Medicine and Practicing Anthropology Can be Complementary: A Physician-Anthropologist in Academic Geriatric Practice

Health, Culture and Society, 2010

The essays in this volume consider what medical anthropology means in the academy and outside of it. Written by a diverse group of anthropologists, some of whom also work as doctors, public health workers, and NGO staff members, the essays share personal insights on how they used anthropology to solve health problems and improve interventions. Several of the contributors draw on their own illness experiences to reconsider the health challenges they have previously sought to understand, analyse, and document. Other essays come from authors who have struggled to incorporate anthropological methodologies and perspectives in multi-disciplinary research and medical relief work. Also included are essays from professional anthropologists who reflect on the value of their discipline’s mission and methodology. This collection demonstrates how anthropology is used in policy and health interventions and attempts to bridge the gaps between policymakers, clinicians, NGO workers, doctors, and aca...

Anthropology in Medical Education: Sustaining Engagement and Impact, 2021

The volume emphasizes the important role of anthropology in educating physicians to improve patient care and population health throughout the world. Reflecting on how anthropologists have engaged in medical education, the chapters in this edited volume aim to positively influence the future careers of anthropologists who are currently engaged or are considering a career in medical education. For over a century, anthropologists have served in many roles in medical education: teaching, curriculum development, administration, research, and planning. Recent changes in medical education focusing on diversity, social determinants of health, and more humanistic patient-centered care have opened the door for more anthropologists in medical schools. Chapter authors describe various ways in which anthropologists have engaged and are currently involved in training physicians in various countries, as well as potential new directions in this field. This volume is essential for medical educators, administrators, researchers, and practitioners, those interested in the history of medicine, global health, sociology of health and illness, as well as medical and applied anthropology. Critical topics addressed include: • the history of anthropology in medical education; • humanism, ethics, and the culture of medicine; • interprofessional and collaborative clinical care; • incorporating patient perspectives in practice; • addressing social determinants of health, health disparities, and cultural competence; • anthropological roles in planning and implementation of medical education programs; • effective strategies for teaching medical students; • comparative analysis of systems of care in Japan, Zambia, France, United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada and throughout the United States; and • potential new directions for anthropological engagement with medicine.

Practicing anthropology, 2020

This article discusses the origins and development of the MS Program in Medical Anthropology in the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences at Boston University School of Medicine. We review how our faculty identified the need for the program as well as how we developed its design and negotiated the degree curriculum and requirements. We trace the evolution of our Service-Learning Internship Program (SLIP) and its establishment at various facilities. Finally, we discuss how we translated anthropological research paradigms to clinical settings and how the degree experience has translated into careers in community-based anthropology.

2017

Recent years have seen a shift in the role of academia within public spheres. This is recognition of the need for collaboration between academia and the wider healthcare community in health research. Additionally, the direction of social science research funding has turned toward the prioritizations of the definable impact interdisciplinary project teams. These shifts in the landscape of social science research highlight the limitedness of purely academic posts within the disciplines of Anthropology and Medical Anthropology. As such, current PhD anthropology researchers are often encouraged to look beyond the academic discipline for professional careers after graduation. Considering these factors, active examinations and contemplations of the ways in which anthropological training and research can be applied to and pursued within other professional vocations are required. This conference is intended to instigate conversations that acknowledge, but sidestep debates about whether or not medical anthropology should or should not be applied beyond the discipline. Rather, this conference is aimed at questions of how. Our goal with this conference is to create a dialogue about practical ways and directions medical anthropological work can be used and made available outside academia, spark collaboration with other professionals, and provide the foundation for a professional career.

Health, Culture and Society, 2010

An introduction rebekah park & sjaak van der geest This volume brings together essays written by people of extremely diverse backgrounds on how their study of medical anthropology has impacted their work and life-primarily outside of academia. It is our intention to shed light on how anthropology is practiced in non-academic settings through the eyes of those who are both within and outside of the university. Academics generally tend to regard applied anthropology as superficial, lacking theory and 'thin' in its efforts to gain attention from non-anthropologists working in public policy and clinical practice. Non-academics, in contrast, often regard the anthropology being practiced and taught in universities as slow, jargon-filled, and overly theoretical. These views underestimate the complexities of making research findings work beyond hypothetical scenarios, as well as the feasibilities of adopting an anthropological approach without working under the label of 'medical anthropologist.' By and large, the authors have avoided the tired debate between theory and practice. The essays address three themes: methodology, personal experience, and anthropological thinking. This volume is less engaged with academic texts as it is with the actual work and life experiences of those trained in anthropology. For this reason, the majority of the chapters deal with methodological challenges within multi-or interdisciplinary projects. Other contributors ruminate on how their anthropological training has impacted their personal lives as they recover from or succumb to illnesses. Others describe ways that people have integrated an anthropological view into jobs, which are not anthropological, and how they are still able to utilize their training regardless of limitations. In our contributions to this volume, we reaffirm the strengths of anthropological methodology. The idea that applied research is theoretically thin is a misunderstanding (Bailey & Van der Geest 2009). Adding practical consequences to ethnographic data rather requires complex theoretical reasoning on agency, situationality and

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1999

2009

Even though the issue of empathy is widely debated in disciplines such as ethnology and medicine, ethnologists' relationship with their informants cannot be likened to that of doctors and their patients. Likewise, the empathic dimension, considered to characterize the relationship in both cases, is not the same. In this article examples drawn from various case studies are used in a cross-cutting analysis of the nature and role of empathy in the contexts of medical and ethnological relationships. The part that empathy plays in the production of knowledge, in both types of relationship, is evaluated. What are the implications of empathy as regards the medical doctor's work and that of the ethnologist, and what is its heuristic value? In other words, what link is there between empathy and the knowledge production process? I show that even though empathy may be useful in both types of situation, ethnologists can derive a benefit from it only if, unlike doctors, they are able to control it and to distance themselves from it.