Medicalizing Ethnicity

Medicalizing Ethnicity
Author: Vilma Santiago-Irizarry
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501718452

In Medicalizing Ethnicity, Vilma Santiago-Irizarry shows how commendable intentions can produce unintended consequences. Santiago-Irizarry conducted ethnographic fieldwork in three bilingual, bicultural psychiatric programs for Latino patients at public mental health facilities in New York City. The introduction of "cultural sensitivity" in mental health clinics, she concludes, led doctors to construct essentialized, composite versions of Latino ethnicity in their drive to treat mental illness with sensitivity. The author demonstrates that stressing Latino differences when dealing with patients resulted not in empowerment, as intended, but in the reassertion of Anglo-American standards of behavior in the guise of psychiatric categories by which Latino culture was negatively defined. For instance, doctors routinely translated their patients' beliefs in the Latino religious traditions of espiritismo and Santería into psychiatric terms, thus treating these beliefs as pathologies.Interpreting mental health care through the framework of culture and politics has potent effects on the understanding of "normality" toward which such care aspires. At the core of Medicalizing Ethnicity is the very definition of multiculturalism used by a variety of institutional settings in an attempt to mandate equality.

Medicalizing Blackness

Medicalizing Blackness
Author: Rana A. Hogarth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-09-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469632888

In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.

Ethnicity and Medical Care

Ethnicity and Medical Care
Author: Alan Harwood
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1492
Release: 1924
Genre: Ethnic groups
ISBN:

Ethnicity and Medical Care equips health professionals with the ethnographic data they need to deliver better health care within American communities of urban blacks, Chinese, Haitians, Italians, Mexicans, Navajos, and Puerto Ricans. Each chapter, dealing in turn with one of these seven American subcultures, reviews the available demographic and epidemiological data and examines sociocultural influences on each major phase of illness. Topics range from culture-specific syndromes such as susto or "evil eye," to concepts of disease based on blood perturbations or God's punishment, to lay-referral networks, consultation of mainstream and non-mainstream sources of medical care, and adherence to treatment regimens. But ethnic behavior often entails general styles of interaction--attitudes toward authority figures, sex-role allocations, and ways of expressing emotion and asking for help--that are carried over into the healthcare setting. Accordingly, Ethnicity and Medical Care also offers general guidelines for providing more personalized, culturally relevant care for any ethnically affiliated patient.

Multicultural Medicine and Health Disparities

Multicultural Medicine and Health Disparities
Author: David Satcher
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2005-10-13
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 007178151X

Specific skills, answers, and guidance to clinical issues raised by management of patients of varied cultural and economic backgrounds. Covers the principles of cultural medicine, which medical schools are addressing in physical exam sessions, and specific diseases, disorders, and clinical entities that have genetic and cultural issues associated with them. Includes case studies and evidence-based recommendations and guidelines.

Minorities in Medicine

Minorities in Medicine
Author: Council on Graduate Medical Education (U.S.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 84
Release: 2005
Genre: Cultural pluralism
ISBN:

Health and Ethnicity

Health and Ethnicity
Author: Helen Macbeth
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2000-12-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1040074308

In modern multicultural societies, the topic of 'health and ethnicity' has become increasingly recognised as highly relevant. All too frequently, academic coverage of the topic has been scattered in specialist literature of different disciplines; a book bringing these perspectives together has so far been lacking. The aim of the book is to explain the diversity in health experience due to determinants and factors that can be described as 'ethnic'. Both 'ethnicity' and 'health' are words that have stimulated semantic debate, and yet too seldom is sufficient sensitivity given over to the complexity of the issue.

Gender, Ethnicity, and Health Research

Gender, Ethnicity, and Health Research
Author: Sana Loue
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 197
Release: 1999-08-31
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0306461722

Health researchers routinely evaluate health and illness across subgroups defined by their sex, gender, ethnicity, and race. All too often, these classifications are proffered as an explanation for any differences that may be detected, for example, in access to care, frequency of disease, or response to treatment. Relatively few researchers, however, have examined what these classifications mean on a theoretical level or in the context of their own research. Assume, for example, that a researcher concludes from his or her data that African- Americans utilize certain surgical procedures less frequently than whites. This conclusion may mean little without an examination of the various underlying issues. Is there such a construct as race at all? How were whites and African-Americans classified as such? Does this finding reflect inappropriate overutilization of the specific procedures among whites or inappropriate underutilization among African-Americans? To what extent are socioeconomic status and method of payment related to the less frequent use? Are there differences in the manner in which health care providers present the various treatment options to whites and to African- Americans that could account for these differences in utilization? Are there differences in health care-seeking and health care preferences between the two groups that would explain the difference in utilization? Is the racial classification a surrogate measure for another variable that has remained unidentified and unmeasured? All too often, unfortunately, such issues are ignored or lightly dismissed with an entreaty for additional research.

Framing the Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity to Advance Health Equity

Framing the Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity to Advance Health Equity
Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2016-10-10
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0309445760

In February 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a workshop in which speakers shared strategies for individuals, organizations, and communities to advance racial and health equity. Participants discussed increasing awareness about the role of historical contexts and dominant narratives in interpreting data and information about different racial and ethnic groups, framing messages for different social and political outcomes, and readying people to institutionalize practices, policies, and partnerships that advance racial and health equity. This publication serves as a factual summary of the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Assessing Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Health

Assessing Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Health
Author: Sana Loue
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2006-08-09
Genre: Medical
ISBN:

Assessing Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Health Sana Loue, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Where there are patients, clients, or study participants, there are data. And when data involve personal variables of race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexual orientation, questions of relevance and marginalization often arise. Assessing Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Health brings needed clarity to the debate by identifying the ethical issues as well as the technical challenges inherent in measuring these elusive concepts. Sana Loue expands on her work begun in Gender, Ethnicity, and Health Research by paralleling the evolution of racial and sexual categories with the development of health research. Her review of the literature clearly explains when and why the use of classification systems may be both clinically and morally appropriate. In addition, Loue provides a salient guide to assessment tools currently used in measuring racial and sexual constructs, identity, and experience. Overview of categories in their sociopolitical context Self-definition vs. definition by others: methodological considerations Review of the overlapping roles of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation in health, health care, and health care disparities Selected measures for assessing ethnicity, ethnic identification, and levels of acculturation Suggested dimensions for assessing sexual orientation Current diagnostic criteria for gender identity disorder Given the prevalence of ethnic- and gender-based data collection throughout the health and mental health fields, this book’s usefulness is not limited to the research community. Physicians, therapists, social workers, and sociologists will find this clear-minded volume an important source of instruments—and insights.