Medical anthropologists study such issues as:
- Health ramifications of ecological “adaptation and maladaptation”
- Popular health culture and domestic health care practices
- Local interpretations of bodily processes
- Changing body projects and valued bodily attributes
- Perceptions of risk, vulnerability and responsibility for illness and health care
- Risk and protective dimensions of human behavior, cultural norms and social institutions
- Preventative health and harm reduction practices
- The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
- The range of factors driving health, nutrition and health care transitions
- Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
- The social organization of clinical interactions
- The cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies
- Medical practices in the context of modernity, colonial, and post-colonial social formations
- The use and interpretation of pharmaceuticals and forms of biotechnology
- The commercialization and commodification of health and medicine
- Disease distribution and health disparity
- Differential use and availability of government and private health care resources
- The political economy of health care provision.
- The political ecology of infectious and vector borne diseases, chronic diseases and states of malnutrition, and violence
- The possibilities for a critically engaged yet clinically relevant application of anthropology
Courtesy of the Society for Medical Anthropology, a Section of the American Anthropological Association