Mohan Dutta: Culture-Centered Approach

I thought this is interesting as we are in health care to some extent. This video is less than 2 minutes long.

In a previous posting, I talked to some extent about a teacher I had in school who died of breast cancer. She never sought biomedical treatment for her disease. She was afraid. She never tried local/ alternative health care in terms of homeopathy or Ayurveda. She went for the religious healing that did not help her save her life. People subscribe to different ideologies and practices for their health outcomes. Their reasons are as varied as the ways they choose. But still, to a large extent the biomedical model has come to dominate the most of the world. As this week's readings elaborate more on this, we find out about the Flexner Report. The Flexner Report (also called Carnegie Foundation Bulletin Number Four) is a book-length study of medical education in the United States and Canada, written by the professional educator Abraham Flexner and published in 1910 under the aegis of the Carnegie Foundation. Many aspects of the present-day American medical profession stem from the Flexn...

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/28/health/1194838918148/translating-health-care.html?hp

A couple of interesting questions arose while reading this week. Let's start with Arakelova's article on healing practices in Armenia. Being somewhat close to this ongoing fight for years by being a German citizens and by experiencing cultural clashes between Yezidis and Kurds on a weekly basis, this article was especially interesting to me. At some point, when the article talked about ethno-religious groups, I started to think about the question we had discussed many times before: What defines identity? What does it take/need to be a culture of its own? Can a culture extinguish because the passing on orally of traditions fails? Another topic that evolved in this reading, but also in Kim's article on Korean elderly was assimilation or acculturation. Arakelova talks about "necessitated assimilation". I wondered, after moving to a new country, is assimilation a voluntary, mandatory, or automatic and completely subconscious process? Is it easier for some but nor for ...

The first question I want to raise is that "does pluralism means agency"?   Meyer's makes a substantive point with his poignant account of Beverly. Quoting him, "the ground upon which chronic illness is made meaningful becomes profoundly unstable when the conditions of experience fail to conform to standard disease categories and their symptomatology." We have come across this thread in previous readings too when we have seen biomedicine being applied and experience reduced to "measurable", "diagnosable" categories.  The other question is what else to do and how to reconcile? In today's world, when movements constantly take people across borders and translational locations, where people exercise their agency (do they?) to get into stultifying systems...what are the options to negotiate health? How do they then exercise agency? Beverly exerts agency when she decides not to apply for social security benefits as then she might be judged inca...

This week's reading discussed the possibilities of alternative ways of healing and health. The debate between traditional methods of cure/ preventing illnesses and the dominant biomedicine was the center of the discussions. With examples from different parts of the world, the authors promoted their viewpoints. Mansfield et. al (2002) focused their research on the religious practices and spiritual beliefs of people regarding health care in people from rural eastern North Carolina, USA. Their research says that "health professionals should consider the faith of patients, not only in God per se, but also in how patients believe that God may act through a health professional in the healing process" (p. 407). Without getting into any criticisms of the study, I would like to share something from this research that reminded me of a personal story about how during critical times of illness people may lean more towards the unexplained and spiritual that what is explicitly availab...

This weeks readings dealt with alternative ways of healing and knowing, wonderful readings that taught me about rituals of healing in other cultures, but also about the struggles that people from these cultures have to deal with on a regular basis due to the forces of Western medicine. Mansfield wrote about spiritual practice and beliefs related to healing. It sounded like a very promising article to begin with, but for some reason did the concept of measuring religiosity and believes in respect to healing NOT sit well with me. I don't understand why people are always trying to put everything within the frames of measurements - I do see that this will help them compare and in Mansfield's case, help to create a model (thinking about it, how stupid is that to begin with???) - but why is there this constant need to compare so one can look better than the other? You can tell from my strong reaction, I think Mansfield's article was maybe worth a big laugh, nothing more, nothing ...