As an aspiring future physician, I chose to research the subtopic of medical anthropology and its contribution to the field. After thorough googling, I came across the Medical Anthropology Quarterly, an International Journal for the Analysis of Health. This website publishes articles pertaining to innovative approaches to contemporary medical anthropology, involving other fields such as humanities and social sciences into the discussion. By including diverse perspectives into this subfield, medical anthropology represents the study of human culture and evolutionary changes, the underlying concept of anthropology.
One of the online published articles “A Capable Surgeon and a Willing Electrologist: Challenges to the Expansion of Transgender Surgical Care in the United States” by Eric Plemons, addresses an existing issue in the medical field. The article states the increased demand for trans-genital reconstruction has faced problems such as denied insurance coverage, shortage of technical skilled training for such procedures, as well as administrative comprehension to integrate such technique into general medical practice.
Social issues impending the fate of trivial matters such as medical development and insurance policy is a really interesting way to observe the definition of medical anthropology. Working in a hospital now, it’s been insightful to learn all the ways to improve patient care both at bedside and in the field together. The combined effort of sociologists, anthropologists, doctors, and business professionals is inspiring.
Another article of interest was “Re‐racialization of Addiction and the Redistribution of Blame in the White Opioid Epidemic” by Sonia Mendoza, Allyssa Stephanie Rivera, and Helena Bjerring Hansen. This was a really engaging observational research on the profiling of current opioid drug users. Though popular thought due to mainstream media have high lighted minority groups in the US, for example black urban or Latino populations, the actualization is that the majority in-group, white population, is the largest overdose deaths recorded. This increase in the severity in the crisis has lead to a shift in narrative describing each case. For the in-group, external blame has caught wind as the reasoning behind overdose and the lure of opioid; as described in the article, framing addiction as a biological disease and the aid of pharmaceutical use. This has lighted the shade thrown on these drug users, while minority groups have been victimized for the same action. Analyzing this data, especially in the highest recorded number of U.S opioid dependent city of New York City, brings into light the reality of our culture and socialization norms.
This last article really resonated with me on how I view societal issue such as the opioid crisis, in the media. There is so much to be said and even more ways to say it that it’s disheartening that we can’t understand how to comprehend the truth or not. This website allows an outlet of pure thought and recognition the population of people without the resources or collective ability to see these trends. I look forward to further investigate other common redistributions of blame, wealth, resource, and other ways our environment has shifted through studying subtopics such as biological anthropology.
The topic of Medical Anthropology also interests me because I want to be a physician’s assistant. I think it is very smart for Medical Anthropology Quarterly to involve humanities and social sciences as a way to help further their discussion of Medical Anthropology. I feel it is always better to have multiple fields to help back up a discussion on how and why humans evolved the way that they did and what influenced them to evolve the way that they do.
You have brought up many relevant topics that serve as an issue today. Discussions such as transgender and drug use are an important concept to understand for why humans behave and feel the way that they do. Moreover, if we understand human behavior in relation to these concepts, there can be more success in Medical Anthropology.
I used to work as a home health aide (mostly for the elderly) and worked with people’s medication. This included things like Fentanyl, Vicodin, and Oxycodone. I think that every single person I worked for had pain medication stolen at some point, mostly by family members, but also by other workers. It’s very interesting to think of the Opioid Crisis in anthropological terms.
The biggest debate during my time in this field was just how much we should worry about opioid addiction with the elderly, that is if it really mattered if they were addicted because many were close to the end of their life and in serious pain. The semantic use of ‘addiction’ vs ‘dependence’ was also something many geriatric care workers talked about.