The Cultural Geography of Health Care

In health delivery and health research, basic concepts of cultural behaviour are frequently ignored - at a high personal and financial cost - because both fields are dominated by technical solutions and quantitative analysis. They have little use for what is often regarded as irrelevant information. In this wide-ranging book, written for students and nonspecialists, Wilbert M. Gesler applies cultural geography to health and shows that throughout the world, in Western and developing countries alike, the social scientists can help inform the medical sciences and make them more effective and less expensive. Gesler argues that medical systems must be seen in a social context. Any medical system has five elements: illness, people, resources, environment, and beliefs. If the medical practitioner does not understand the patient within the context of the patient's society, culture and beliefs, the treatment will be threatened. For example, a formally trained physician in a Boston hospital who fails to understand the socioeconomic background of a patient can do more inadvertent damage than the practitioner from the folk culture of a developing country. Many people practice geophagy (eating earth), but the reasons vary between Africans, who may do so for reasons of diet, and Americans, who often have cultural and phychological concerns. folk drugs of Appalachia - plants - are scorned by traditional practitioners of American medicine but are to be understood and appreciated within their physical and social context. In a wide variety of comparisons such as these, Professor Gesler applies religion, ecology, evolution, , diffusion, folk culture, language, political economy, and sense of place to medicine as it as practiced in India, Thailand, South Korea, Ethiopia, the United States, amd many other countries. The cultural geography of health care discusses a multitude of social, scientific, and cultural concepts in a variety of settings. It is clear, stimulating and highly readable introduction to the relationship between the hard and soft sciences that is becoming the fulcrum for medicine; it will be invaluable for students of medicine, the health professions, and the social sciences.