MDHM631

Examines the effects of society and culture on health and healing practices. Topics may include how culture and ethnicity affect health and the way patients conceptualize it, differences between health care providers’ disease models and what their patients believe, folk illnesses and ethnomedical systems compared to western medicine, alternative or complementary medical treatments, and the political economy of health. Considers the interplay of culture, biology, and environment in influencing human illness and behavioral responses to it, with special emphasis on culture and the socially constructed meanings sufferers derive from the illness experience. In addition to weekly readings and homework assignments, students complete a research paper in which they examine a health-related topic from a medical anthropology perspective.