Applied medical anthropology

Applied Medical Anthropology

The medical anthropology is a part of the field of anthropology that focuses on how human cultures define and affect medical and health issues, As a subfield, medicalanthropology draws upon the expertise of the major fields of anthropology as well as medicine, public health, philosophy, environmental science and sociology. Particularly over the last 25 years,migration, urbanization and technology have made delivering effective and equitable health care much more challenging. Medical anthropology has developed to research and understand the intersections ofculture and medical practice and knowledge. Medical anthropologists study topics such as health-care culture and practices, cultural interpretations of medicine and disease, perceptions of how the bodyfunctions, and cultural and economic disparities in health and health-care provision. Medical anthropology is often also applied anthropology, which directly uses anthropological research to improvesystems, organizations or individual lives. Some medical anthropologists work with doctors, nurses, scientists and/or patients to promote cultural knowledge and the best delivery of medical care withincultural constructs.
The recognition of the usefulness of ethnographic research in Third World community health projects and programs developed rapidly during the 1980s, has being one of the mostimportant jobs os teh applied medical antrhopology, As a result, the various agencies and organizations promoting community health programs have greatly increased their recruiting of social scientists,particularly medical anthropologists, for research and other programmatic activities in primary health care, child survival.
AIDS research has being one of the most important topics in medicalanthropology, and one of the reasons is because of the clear relationship between cultural and biological aspects in a society, but the anthropologist have being clear about the importance of thec...