Medical Anthropology

Today, the domain of anthropology is often mixed with public administration, psychology, history, and medical sciences. It is seen that in current times, experts from medical sciences often consult anthropologists to understand the characteristics of medical sciences. This further helps to understand all related aspects of health, disease, and illness and helps professionals innovate strategies to approach critical medical issues effectively. 

The Anthropological View of Health 

Physical anthropology and medical sciences have a close connection and have an interdependent relationship. However, physical anthropology is incomplete and functions in tandem with medical sciences. Primarily, anthropology offers three approaches regarding medical sciences to understand human health conceptually.

1. The Ecological or Epidemiological Approach: This approach mainly focuses on health as an outcome of its culture.
2. Critical Medical Anthropology Approach: This primarily focuses on how politics and economics play an important role to influence on human health, especially about social relation
3. Interpretative Approach: This approach mainly focuses on how the culture gives meaning to the health phenomena

The anthropological view of health is a biocultural way to understand the health profile of a community and explore the different characteristics of medical sciences to understand in depth.

Under the biocultural approach, human beings are considered social beings who are associated with their environment both physically and culturally. When the further analysis is extrapolated, the interaction of the different social and biological elements is explored, which helps define a community’s health status. The health status of a community indicates how efficiently the community is adapted and habituated to its environment. 

Scope of Medical Anthropology and Medical Sciences

Medical anthropologists try to view health and illness from a social, cultural perspective. They try to evaluate and understand how different communities try to counter disease and illness and how medical sciences can play an important role here. They try to evaluate illness as well as a cure from both natural as well as personalistic perspectives.

Most medical anthropologists try to study the characteristics of ancient medical sciences prevalent in the world. 

It was anthropologists George Foster and Barbara Anderson, along with Khwaja Hassan, who established medical anthropology and primarily identified three major disease theory systems that explain illness:

• Personalistic Disease Theory: Illness is majorly the action of an agent, which can be a witch or a supernatural entity.

• Emotionalistic Disease Theory: Illness is caused due to a certain kind of negative emotional experience

• Naturalistic Theory: Illness is caused due to an impersonal factor which can be malnutrition, a pathogen, or an obstruction. 

Today, ethnomedicine plays a very important role in the field of medical anthropology. It is correlated to indigenous medical practices, especially prevalent in rural as well as urban areas. It primarily focuses on the oral tradition of rural as well as tribal areas. It also takes into understanding the different practices of medical sciences, the effectiveness of traditional health care, diagnosis, and different treatment methods. 

Today, medical anthropology is delving more and emphasising different aspects of medical sciences. The research is not limited to just epidemiology, anatomy, and characterisation of physical health but also about drug abuse, paediatrics, drug training, as well as the functioning of medical personnel. 

Culture and Medical Sciences

When we try to understand the characteristics of medical sciences in anthropology, we try to emphasise groups. Primarily, the study focuses on studying human beings within the framework of a culture.

What we mean by culture is a set of beliefs and behaviours that a group shares. Among other things, it also includes their attitudes as well as how a person should receive treatment during illness.

It is seen that people with different cultural orientations and experiences have various notions regarding the concepts of cure and treatment.

In tribal societies, there is an important type of disease concept that can be identified.

• Black Magic or Sorcery: In such a society, death is always regarded to happen due to unnatural causes. Here, the diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis are made with the help of traditional medicine.

• The Intrusion of Foreign Object: People in such societies generally relate foreign object entrance to a superhuman agency. The curative measure in such cases is extraction. 

• Independent Occurrence: These diseases can generally be cured with domestic remedies. 

Such knowledge regarding the various concepts of disease and healing is quite significant for a medical practitioner to understand different healing aspects that eventually become a part of medical sciences. 

The Theory of Culture and Relationship with Health

In 1948, Malinowski developed the theory of culture, which defines the basic as well as derived needs of the organism. The theory concluded that ego is largely structured on how the basic needs are satisfied, and among other basic needs, health plays a major role. Therefore, when the needs of people do not get adequately fulfilled, there is a failure of ego integration.

So, anthropological experts started promoting psychosomatic medicine, which has very recently been recognised as a branch of medicine. 

Psychosomatic medicine refers to a comprehensive as well as interdisciplinary framework in medical sciences where various psychological factors are assessed, which can affect an individual’s vulnerability and course of illness. Also, in such a framework, the biopsychosocial patient care consideration and specialist interventions are integrated for the treatment and rehabilitation of various diseases.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be understood that anthropology in various elements overlaps with medical sciences. Anthropology can assist medical practitioners in identifying health needs and helping in understanding factors that can influence the utilisation of different health services, and understanding the characteristics of medical sciences.