Ch14 The Body Biocultural Perspectives On Exam Questions

Chapter 14: The Body: Biocultural Perspectives on Health and Illness

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 01

1) What subfield of anthropology tries to understand how social, cultural, biological, and linguistic factors shape the health of human beings in different cultures?

Feedback: Medical anthropology is the subfield of anthropology that tries to understand how social, cultural, biological, and linguistic factors shape the health of human beings.

Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. Physical anthropology

b. Medical anthropology

c. Linguistic anthropology

d. Biological anthropology

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 02

2) Health and illness

Feedback: At first glance, “health” and “illness” seem to be straightforward concepts. Dictionaries often define health as the “soundness of body and mind” or as “freedom from disease,” and illness as being “unhealthy” or having a “disease,” “malady,” or “sickness.” The problem is that ideas like “soundness of body” and “malady” do not suggest any objective measure of when we have health and when it has left us. For example, most people feel sore after a hard workout at the gym, and many people have mild seasonal allergies and sinus conditions that rarely impair their daily lives but can be annoying.
Page reference: How Do Biological and Cultural Factors Shape Our Bodily Experiences?

a. can readily be objectively measured by doctors with the right equipment.

b. form a straightforward concept well understood by physicians.

c. are stable and unchanging across the world.

d. have much variation throughout different cultures and societies.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 03

3) In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries American doctors often had second jobs as

Feedback: Medical doctors in the United States have one of the most prestigious, respected, and well-paid occupations. The prestige and social authority doctors enjoy, however, are relatively new. Throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American doctors had low social status. Medicine was not sophisticated, and doctors often doubled as barbers. During the Civil War, surgeons were little more than butchers who amputated with large, dirty saws, using no antibiotics (the first, penicillin, was discovered in 1928), few painkillers, and no antiseptics.
Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. nutritionists.

b. politicians.

c. morticians.

d. barbers.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 04

4) Breastfeeding was universal in the United States until baby formula was developed when?

Feedback: Breastfeeding was universal until the 1950s, when baby formula was developed, and most American pediatricians promoted formula as a technologically superior way to ensure the health of the baby. By the 1970s, new scientific analyses of the contents of breast milk indicated that breast milk contained antibodies that helped the child ward off infections. Rather than viewing breast milk as unsophisticated, the medical world began to see it as nature’s way of protecting the child. About the same time in many developing countries, international aid workers were promoting baby formula as a way of producing strong, healthy babies. But by the 1990s, it became clear that this practice was not ideal: babies became malnourished because their poor mothers could not afford enough formula, and where clean drinking water was scarce, mothers often had no choice but to use unsanitary water for their baby formula, resulting in much higher rates of fatal diarrhea.

Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. 1920s

b. 1930s

c. 1950s

d. 1970s

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 05

5) An explanation given for medicalizing the nonmedical is

Feedback: Three major reasons have been suggested for medicalizing the non-medical. The first is financial: pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and insurance companies stand to make larger profits when they can define a new disease for which they can provide treatment, care, and coverage. A second explanation is that medicalization enhances the social authority of physicians. A third explanation concerns Americans’ current preference for viewing social problems in scientific rather than moral or social terms.

Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. the growth in profits for insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

b. to decrease the prestige of physicians.

c. the denial among people to see social problems in scientific terms.

d. inaccurate, as there is a movement towards demedicalization.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 06

6) Medical knowledge is

Feedback: Medical anthropologists realize the limitations of scientific knowledge, and they began to challenge whether the doctors always had such special and privileged knowledge. Perhaps the patient understood some aspects of his or her body that the physician did not, and perhaps could not, understand. We have already discussed the subjectivity of pain and other symptoms. But in addition, medical knowledge is constantly changing, so how could doctors always have all the answers for how to treat their patients?
Page reference: How Do Biological and Cultural Factors Shape Our Bodily Experiences?

a. stable.

b. narrow.

c. constantly changing.

d. not scientifically proven.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 07

7) The purely physiological condition of suffering is

Feedback: Disease is the purely physiological condition of being sick, usually determined by a physician.
Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. disease.

b. illness.

c. the sick role.

d. medicalization.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 08

8) The experience of physical suffering is

Feedback: Illness is the psychological and social experience a patient has of a disease.
Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. disease.

b. illness.

c. the sick role.

d. medicalization.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 09

9) The process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that were not previously understood as medical problems is called

Feedback: Medicalization is the process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that were not previously understood as medical problems.
Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. medical anthropology.

b. medical pluralism.

c. medicalization.

d. disease etiology.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 10

10) Paul Farmer did much of his ethnographic and applied work in which country?

Feedback: Using anthropology’s holistic perspective to understand communities and their social problems, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer began research for his dissertation in Haiti. As an undergraduate, Farmer had majored in anthropology at Duke University. In 1983, before beginning medical school at Harvard, he spent some time in Cange, a community in the mountainous central plateau of Haiti. In this extremely poor area, he could see firsthand that the social, economic, political, and health problems were interconnected. Farmer saw these connections before HIV/AIDS had been identified and before large numbers of HIV/AIDS cases had been diagnosed in Haiti. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic broke out, the connections between the health of Haitians and socioeconomic and political conditions became even more obvious.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. United States

b. Mexico

c. Africa

d. Haiti

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 11

11) Paul Farmer's work was originally focused on what disease?

Feedback: Using anthropology’s holistic perspective to understand communities and their social problems, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer began research for his dissertation in Haiti. As an undergraduate, Farmer had majored in anthropology at Duke University. In 1983, before beginning medical school at Harvard, he spent some time in Cange, a community in the mountainous central plateau of Haiti. In this extremely poor area, he could see firsthand that the social, economic, political, and health problems were interconnected. Farmer saw these connections before HIV/AIDS had been identified and before large numbers of HIV/AIDS cases had been diagnosed in Haiti. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic broke out, the connections between the health of Haitians and socioeconomic and political conditions became even more obvious.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. Malaria

b. Diabetes

c. AIDS

d. Cancer

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 12

12) Nearly all societies draw on more than one medical tradition simultaneously, a process which is called

Feedback: Medical pluralism is the coexistence and interpenetration of distinct medical traditions with different cultural roots in the same cultural community.
Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. medicalization.

b. the sick role.

c. symbolic treatment.

d. medical pluralism.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 13

13) The clinical therapeutic process involves

Feedback: Clinical therapeutic process is a healing process that involves the use of medicines that have some active ingredient that is assumed to address either the cause or the symptom of a disorder.
Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

a. a doctor observing a patient's symptoms and prescribing a treatment.

b. healing rituals.

c. a patient's social networks, who typically surround the patient.

d. a patient being given a nonmedicine as if it were a medicine.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 14

14) The symbolic therapeutic process involves

Feedback: Healing rituals act as a symbolic therapeutic process by virtue of their role in structuring the meanings of the symbols used. The symbolism of healing rituals comes from a number of sources, invoking our olfactory senses and our senses of taste and touch. It can also involve chanting, drumming, singing, and other sounds that create particular moods. Typically, the rituals provide a symbolic temporal progression, as in the form of a mythological story, that the affliction is supposed to follow for the patient to recover and heal.
Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

a. a doctor observing a patient's symptoms and prescribing a treatment.

b. healing rituals.

c. a patient's social networks, who typically surround the patient.

d. a patient being given a nonmedicine as if it were a medicine.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 15

15) Ayurvedic medicine is a good example of

Feedback: The folk medical domain includes that section of the health-care system composed of non-orthodox profession and paraprofessional healers—religious healers, quacks, practitioners of chiropractic and osteopathy, and other specialists.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. the subjectivity of illness.

b. medicalization.

c. folk medicine.

d. medical pluralism.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 16

16) Medical anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes uncovered a large criminal network engaged in the black market sale of

Feedback: Recently, Scheper-Hughes has been studying the illegal sale of body parts. She has interviewed a Brazilian organ- trafficker in his prison cell, people whose kidneys had been sold, and other people involved in this trafficking. In July 2009, Scheper-Hughes assisted authorities in arresting a Brooklyn man accused of selling black-market kidneys. The New York Daily News heralded Scheper-Hughes as having an anthropological “‘Dick Tracy’ moment” when she turned over information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that allowed them to bring this suspected organ-trafficker to justice (Daly 2009). This led to exposing an extensive network that involved people in several countries.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. illegal drugs.

b. children.

c. bacteria.

d. body parts.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 17

17) Biocultural refers to the complex intersections of biological, psychological, and cultural processes.

Feedback: Biocultural is the complex intersections of biological, psychological, and cultural processes.
Page reference: How Do Biological and Cultural Factors Shape Our Bodily Experiences?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 18

18) Stigmatized groups in society, whether responsible or not, are often blamed for health problems in many cultures.

Feedback: Culture shapes some basic aspects of perception. Cultural differences in perception suggest that mental development varies with cultural practices. Research has also demonstrated that the mental stresses people experience because of rapid social and political-economic change have physical and bodily consequences, including raising blood pressure, affecting our immunity to disease, and creating symptoms of fatigue or feelings of inadequacy.
Page reference: How Do Biological and Cultural Factors Shape Our Bodily Experiences?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 19

19) Health and illness are objective states.

Feedback: At first glance, “health” and “illness” seem to be straightforward concepts. Dictionaries often define health as the “soundness of body and mind” or as “freedom from disease,” and illness as being “unhealthy” or having a “disease,” “malady,” or “sickness.” The problem is that ideas like “soundness of body” and “malady” do not suggest any objective measure of when we have health and when it has left us. For example, most people feel sore after a hard workout at the gym, and many people have mild seasonal allergies and sinus conditions that rarely impair their daily lives but can be annoying.
Page reference: How Do Biological and Cultural Factors Shape Our Bodily Experiences?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 20

20) The prestige and social authority doctors enjoy is relatively new.

Feedback: Medical doctors in the United States have one of the most prestigious, respected, and well-paid occupations. The prestige and social authority doctors enjoy, however, are relatively new. Throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American doctors had low social status. Medicine was not sophisticated, and doctors often doubled as barbers. During the Civil War, surgeons were little more than butchers who amputated with large, dirty saws, using no antibiotics (the first, penicillin, was discovered in 1928), few painkillers, and no antiseptics.
Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 21

21) The current head of the World Bank is a medical anthropologist.

Feedback: Working with another M.D.-Ph.D. student, Jim Yong Kim, who went on to head the World Bank, Farmer helped found an organization in the highland district of Cange in 1987. They called this organization Partners in Health and developed a small health center. The international health community was initially focused on treating HIV/AIDS patients and on dealing with other public health concerns to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS. But Farmer and Kim had larger goals that they saw as related to health in the Haitian community. They began encouraging local people to plant trees in the once-lush forested region that had been devastated from poverty and rapid population growth, which led to deforestation as poor Haitians turned to their last resource (trees) to make into charcoal. Farmer and Kim put together an integrated program that attacked the causes of poverty and environmental degradation as a way of improving health.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 22

22) What is the “subjectivity of illness”?

Feedback: The subjectivity of illness is how people perceive and experience their condition on a personal level.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. The idea that diseases cannot be measured objectively

b. How people understand and experience their condition on a personal level

c. The process of testing that determines if a patient is really sick or not

d. The effort to blame people for their own sickness

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 23

23) When anthropologist Robert Welsch got sick in Papua New Guinea, most of the villagers attributed his symptoms to

Feedback: One day, Welsch noticed that his body ached all over and his forehead burned with a high fever. It was malaria. At first he retired to his bed to rest, but the fever turned into chills, followed by sweats and an even worse body ache. He took antimalarial pills and aspirin, but the headache became so bad it was unbearable to lay his head on a pillow. Like most Americans, he wanted to be by himself and endure this agony alone. But Ningerum villagers did not sit idly by. As Welsch’s condition worsened, more and more of his friends in the village came by the house to sit and chat and smoke. He later realized that most people in the village attributed his sudden symptoms to sorcery: someone in the area had used magic to hurt him, and people expected him to die. If

Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. the flu.

b. malaria.

c. sorcery.

d. homesickness.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 24

24) For the Ningerum patient to get help with his or her care and treatment, the main thing to do is

Feedback: Welsch found that Ningerum people had a different sick role model, believing that if patients still enjoy a minimum of physical strength, they should themselves deal with the illness. For the Ningerum patient to get help with his or her care and treatment, the patient is obliged to display to family and friends precisely how sick and disabled he or she is. Patients convey this information through their actions or visible physical signs of illness rather than through their words. Startling symptoms such as fainting, bleeding, vomiting, shrieking, and sudden weight loss call family members to action. Patients can also display the severity of their condition by using props like a walking stick to limp cautiously across the village plaza, shedding clothing, refusing to eat, or smearing their chests and legs with mud and dirt.

Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. pay lots of money.

b. describe in detail how sick he or she is.

c. display visible signs of his or her illness.

d. hide away at home.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 25

25) Which of the following activities or behaviors is not part of the American sick role?

Feedback: In all societies around the world, when a person is ill, there are expectations of how that person, as well as friends and family, should behave. For Americans, this typically means the sick person should not go to school or work, should stay in bed and rest, should be given chicken soup, and so on. But these patterns vary cross-culturally.

Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. They are free from the obligation to go to work or school because they are sick.

b. They are not expected to seek medical care from a professional or family caregiver.

c. They are expected to try to get better and assist in their care as much as possible.

d. They are free from blame for their sickness.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 26

26) A good example of the process of medicalization is found in the changing understanding of which of the following conditions as a “disease”?

Feedback: Medicalization is the process of viewing or treating as a medical concern conditions that were not previously understood as medical problems.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. Diabetes

b. Alcoholism

c. Albinism

d. HIV

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 27

27) According the medical anthropologists Csordas and Kleinman, the several therapeutic processes that bring healing include which of the following?

Feedback: In the mid-1970s, physician, psychiatrist, and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman published an essay on the history of medical anthropology. In it he added a short appendix where he introduced a new methodology around the concept of explanatory models, highlighting several cases he had come across in his work at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. Clinical processes, symbolic processes, and social support

b. Placebo effect and symbolic medicine

c. Social support and the nocebo effect

d. Clinical processes, ritual, and placebos

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 28

28) Symbolic healing rituals involving oils, herbs, and drumming are considered

Feedback: Healing rituals act as a symbolic therapeutic process by virtue of their role in structuring the meanings of the symbols used. The symbolism of healing rituals comes from a number of sources, invoking our olfactory senses and our senses of taste and touch. It can also involve chanting, drumming, singing, and other sounds that create particular moods. Typically, the rituals provide a symbolic temporal progression, as in the form of a mythological story, that the affliction is supposed to follow for the patient to recover and heal.
Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

a. to be in the folk medicine domain.

b. as not working.

c. to be increasingly medicalized.

d. to prove the point of the placebo effect.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 29

29) When a doctor observes a patient's symptoms and prescribes a treatment that he or she thinks will act directly on the patient's body to cure the problem, the doctor is adopting which kind of treatment process?

Feedback: Clinical therapeutic process is a healing process that involves the use of medicines that have some active ingredient that is assumed to address either the cause or the symptom of a disorder.

Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

a. Medicalization

b. Clinical therapeutic process

c. Symbolic process

d. Persuasion

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 30

30) Frank pulled his back out and went to see a chiropractor, an orthopedic surgeon, and an acupuncturist. Which of the following practices was Frank engaging in?

Feedback: Medical pluralism is the coexistence and interpenetration of distinct medical traditions with different cultural roots in the same cultural community.
Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. Medicalization

b. The placebo effect

c. Medical pluralism

d. Medical singularism

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 31

31) When anthropologist Robert Welsch had a very high fever from malaria in Papua New Guinea, why did the Ningerum villagers want to take him to the health center many miles away?

Feedback: One day, Welsch noticed that his body ached all over and his forehead burned with a high fever. It was malaria. At first he retired to his bed to rest, but the fever turned into chills, followed by sweats and an even worse body ache. He took antimalarial pills and aspirin, but the headache became so bad it was unbearable to lay his head on a pillow. Like most Americans, he wanted to be by himself and endure this agony alone. But Ningerum villagers did not sit idly by. As Welsch’s condition worsened, more and more of his friends in the village came by the house to sit and chat and smoke. He later realized that most people in the village attributed his sudden symptoms to sorcery: someone in the area had used magic to hurt him, and people expected him to die. If

Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

a. They were trying to nurse him back to health.

b. They were trying to distract him from his symptoms.

c. They did not want to be suspected of bewitching him with sorcery.

d. They were curious about his strange illness.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 32

32) Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropologist who conducted research in Taiwan, argued that the key to understanding differences in perspective between doctors and patients is that healers and patients often have different

Feedback: In the mid-1970s, physician, psychiatrist, and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman published an essay on the history of medical anthropology. In it he added a short appendix where he introduced a new methodology around the concept of explanatory models, highlighting several cases he had come across in his work at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. access to medical technology.

b. access to education and medical training.

c. class backgrounds.

d. ways of explaining what is happening to the sick persons.

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 33

33) During the Civil War surgeons were little more than butchers who amputated with large, dirty saws, using no antibiotics, few painkillers, and no antiseptics.

Feedback: Medical doctors in the United States have one of the most prestigious, respected, and well-paid occupations. The prestige and social authority doctors enjoy, however, are relatively new. Throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American doctors had low social status. Medicine was not sophisticated, and doctors often doubled as barbers. During the Civil War, surgeons were little more than butchers who amputated with large, dirty saws, using no antibiotics (the first, penicillin, was discovered in 1928), few painkillers, and no antiseptics.

Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 34

34) Doctors throughout the world enjoy a high degree of prestige.

Feedback: The sociologist Eliot Freidson (1970) was among the first to identify the professionalization of the field of medicine as responsible for giving the doctor’s perspective privilege over the understandings of ordinary people. Subsequently, medical sociologist Paul Starr (1982) argued that, during the twentieth century, medical doctors in the United States had used their professional status to increase their incomes, the level of respect they received from the public, and the exclusive right to determine the course of treatment for particular patients. American physicians formed professional associations like the American Medical Association, which allowed them to control how many new doctors were being trained. But while American physicians had achieved professional privileges, great respect, and high salaries, few of these perks were enjoyed by doctors in most other countries.

Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 35

35) Diabetics often have better control of their blood sugar when they are with supportive family members but poorer control when feeling isolated.

Feedback: The social support therapeutic process involves a patient’s social networks, who typically surround the patient. Although relatives and friends may perform some (usually) minor treatments on the patient, the major thrust of this therapeutic process comes from the presence of family members who provide comfort and aid to the sick person. Feeling aided and supported by his or her relatives may affect the patient’s bodily functions. For example, diabetics often have better control of their blood sugars when they are with supportive family members, but poorer control when feeling isolated.

Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

a. True

b. False

Type: True/False

Title: Chapter 14 Question 36

36) The first cases of HIV in Africa appeared along highways because of the interactions between prostitutes and truckers traveling long distances.

Feedback: In East Africa, for example, HIV was first noticed along major highway routes where long-haul truckers became infected through heterosexual contacts with infected prostitutes, taking the infection to women in the next truck-stop town. Truck stops produced ideal conditions for transmission of HIV because they provided a meeting place for truckers and prostitutes who had connections to wide-ranging and international social networks. Anthropologist and geographer Ezekiel Kalipeni suggests that epidemiologists and medical researchers had completely missed seeing these patterns. He argues that medical researchers explained the observed distribution of cases in terms of traditional patterns of African sexuality, which the medical community assumed was radically different from those of Western Europe.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. True

b. False

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 37

37) If a medical anthropologist like Arthur Kleinman were to turn his attention to studying the outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, he would likely want to understand

Feedback: In the mid-1970s, physician, psychiatrist, and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman published an essay on the history of medical anthropology. In it he added a short appendix where he introduced a new methodology around the concept of explanatory models, highlighting several cases he had come across in his work at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

a. how local people interpret the symptoms of Ebola, its causes, and its threat.

b. what was necessary in the U.S. in terms of protective clothing and sanitation to limit the spread of the disease.

c. the weaknesses of resources of West African nations to deal with the epidemic.

d. naïve presumptions about disease causation.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 38

38) What is an “explanatory model” of a disease like cancer?

Feedback: Explanatory model of illness is an explanation of what is happening to a patient’s body, by the patient, by the patient’s family, or by a healthcare practitioner, each of whom may have a different model of what is happening.
Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. A simplified physical model of the body with all the organs affected by the cancer identified in it

b. A general approach to explaining the incidence of cancer among various groups

c. A biological theory that explains why certain people get cancer and others do not

d. A general explanation held by individual patients and their families that accounts for the patient's symptoms, the causes of these symptoms, and how to best treat the cancer

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 39

39) In which of the following ways would the sick role of people in an African country be expected to differ from the American sick role?

Feedback: Sick role is the culturally defined agreement between patients and family members to acknowledge that a patient is legitimately sick, which involves certain responsibilities and behaviors that caregivers expect of the sick.
Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

a. Although it would need to be confirmed with empirical evidence, we could presume that people must want to get better and should assist in their therapy.

b. Although all societies will have some form of sick role, it is impossible to know what form the local sick role takes without interviewing and observing local people when they are sick.

c. From statistical analyses, we would expect that people will be afraid of any contagious disease.

d. Because Africans are less educated than Americans, we would expect that most people will believe in magic and ritual healing.

Type: multiple choice question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 40

40) What is the most striking difference between a physician's approach to a sick patient and a medical anthropologist's perspective?

Feedback: Clinical therapeutic process is a healing process that involves the use of medicines that have some active ingredient that is assumed to address either the cause or the symptom of a disorder. Medical anthropology is the subfield of anthropology that tries to understand how social, cultural, biological, and linguistic factors shape the health of human beings.

Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

a. Physicians will focus on the clinical processes that explain the disease, while medical anthropologists will focus only on the patient's symptoms.

b. Doctors will not be concerned with the patient's feelings since as physicians they know what is happening, while the medical anthropologist will be concerned with the patient's anxiety and fear during treatment.

c. Doctors will focus on the clinical processes that explain the disease, while medical anthropologists will want to look at the illness from all perspectives.

d. There is often little difference in perspective among these experts.

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 14 Question 41

41) Explain the differences between how a medical anthropologist and a physician would approach an outbreak of flu at your university.

Feedback: Medical anthropology is the subfield of anthropology that tries to understand how social, cultural, biological, and linguistic factors shape the health of human beings.
Page reference: What Do We Mean by Health and Illness?

Type: Short Answer

Title: Chapter 14 Question 42

42) Before Arthur Kleinman's research, medical anthropologists tended to assume that everyone in a small-scale society made similar decisions about treating health problems. Why did a perspective that emphasizes individual “explanatory models” transform the field of medical anthropology?

Feedback: In the mid-1970s, physician, psychiatrist, and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman published an essay on the history of medical anthropology. In it he added a short appendix where he introduced a new methodology around the concept of explanatory models, highlighting several cases he had come across in his work at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 43

43) Explain what the power of the placebo effect as demonstrated in the French naproxen study might tell us about the effectiveness of other drugs besides painkillers.

Feedback: A dramatic illustration of the power of the placebo effect comes from a French study conducted in the 1990s. In this study, researchers divided a group of hospitalized cancer patients with mild to moderate cancer pain into four groups to test the effectiveness of naproxen, at the time a new painkiller that many people now know by the brand name Aleve. None of the patients experienced so much pain that they required opiates, and the study put none of the patients in significant distress.

Page reference: How Does Healing Happen?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 44

44) If you were confronting the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, your first task would be to stabilize the epidemic and provide enough beds for all the Ebola patients as well as separate facilities for patients with other health problems. What approach would you suggest next if you followed the agenda of medical anthropologists Paul Farmer and Jim Yon Kim, who advocated an integrated program to combat the long-term effects of the epidemic?

Feedback: Using anthropology’s holistic perspective to understand communities and their social problems, anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer began research for his dissertation in Haiti. As an undergraduate, Farmer had majored in anthropology at Duke University. In 1983, before beginning medical school at Harvard, he spent some time in Cange, a community in the mountainous central plateau of Haiti. In this extremely poor area, he could see firsthand that the social, economic, political, and health problems were interconnected. Farmer saw these connections before HIV/AIDS had been identified and before large numbers of HIV/AIDS cases had been diagnosed in Haiti. When the HIV/AIDS epidemic broke out, the connections between the health of Haitians and socioeconomic and political conditions became even more obvious.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 45

45) In most countries around the world physicians typically have much lower salaries than physicians in the United States. How can we explain this fact if American physicians are no more effective at treating their patients than doctors in other countries and if medical training is roughly comparable overseas to that in the United States?

Feedback: Medical doctors in the United States have one of the most prestigious, respected, and well-paid occupations. The prestige and social authority doctors enjoy, however, are relatively new. Throughout most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American doctors had low social status. Medicine was not sophisticated, and doctors often doubled as barbers. During the Civil War, surgeons were little more than butchers who amputated with large, dirty saws, using no antibiotics (the first, penicillin, was discovered in 1928), few painkillers, and no antiseptics.
Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 46

46) According to medical anthropologists, how might a prayer circle in one town help a sick patient in a neighboring town? Do medical anthropologists have to become religious as a result, or are there other ways of explaining traditional healing practices?

Feedback: The folk medical domain includes that section of the health-care system composed of non-orthodox profession and paraprofessional healers—religious healers, quacks, practitioners of chiropractic and osteopathy, and other specialists.
Page reference: What Can Anthropology Do to Help Us Address Global Health Problems?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 47

47) From what you know of American cultural values about health and disease, why does it make sense that alcoholism is largely defined as a medical problem today, even though in past decades drunkenness was seen as a moral failing?

Feedback: Three major reasons have been suggested for medicalizing the non-medical. The first is financial: pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and insurance companies stand to make larger profits when they can define a new disease for which they can provide treatment, care, and coverage. A second explanation is that medicalization enhances the social authority of physicians. A third explanation concerns Americans’ current preference for viewing social problems in scientific rather than moral or social terms.

Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?

Type: essay/short answer question

Title: Chapter 14 Question 48

48) What factors were important in changing the way Americans breastfeed or bottle-feed their babies?

Feedback: Breastfeeding was universal until the 1950s, when baby formula was developed, and most American pediatricians promoted formula as a technologically superior way to ensure the health of the baby. By the 1970s, new scientific analyses of the contents of breast milk indicated that breast milk contained antibodies that helped the child ward off infections. Rather than viewing breast milk as unsophisticated, the medical world began to see it as nature’s way of protecting the child. About the same time in many developing countries, international aid workers were promoting baby formula as a way of producing strong, healthy babies. But by the 1990s, it became clear that this practice was not ideal: babies became malnourished because their poor mothers could not afford enough formula, and where clean drinking water was scarce, mothers often had no choice but to use unsanitary water for their baby formula, resulting in much higher rates of fatal diarrhea.

Page reference: How and Why Do Doctors, Healers, and Other Health Practitioners Gain Social Authority?