The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine

Download or read book The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine written by Martha O. Loustaunau and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1997 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loustaunau and Sobo demonstrate the ways in which cultural and social factors shape medicine and health care. After a discussion of culture, the social structure and the impact of poverty, class, gender, and family patterns on health, illness and care-seeking, they explain the similarities and differences of medical systems cross-culturally. The authors call for a more flexible and culturally sensitive system of health care that expresses caring in more holistic ways, and offer examples as to how this might be accomplished in the increasingly multicultural USA.