Lupton′s newest edition of Medicine as Culture is more relevant than ever. Trudy Rudge, Professor of Nursing, University of Sydney A welcome update of a text that has become a mainstay of the medical sociologist′s library. Alan Radley, Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, Loughborough University Medicine as Culture introduces students to a broad range of cross-disciplinary theoretical perspectives, using examples that emphasize bodies and visual images. Lupton′s core contrast between lay perspectives on illness and medical power is a useful beginning point for courses teaching health and illness from a socio-cultural perspective. Arthur Frank, Department of Sociology, University of Calgary Medicine as Culture is unlike any other sociological text on health and medicine. It combines perspectives drawn from a wide variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, social history, cultural geography, and media and cultural studies. The book explores the ways in which medicine and health care are sociocultural constructions, ranging from popular media and elite cultural representations of illness to the power dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship. The Third Edition has been updated to cover new areas of interest, including: - studies of space and place in relation to the body - actor-network theory as it is applied in research related to medicine - The internet and social media and how they contribute to lay health knowledge and patient support - complementary and alternative medicine - obesity and fat politics. Contextualising introductions and discussion points in every chapter makes Medicine as Culture, Third Edition a rigorous yet accessible text for students. Deborah Lupton is an independent sociologist and Honorary Associate in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney.

A classic comparative study of medicine and national culture, Medicine and Culture shows us that while doctors regard themselves as servants of science, they are often prisoners of custom.

This book situates biomedicine within American culture and argues that the very organization and practice of medicine are themselves cultural. It demonstrates the symbolic construction of clinical reality within American biomedicine and shows how biomedicine never leaves the realm of the personal.

The author concludes that medical decisions are often based on cultural biases and philosophies, suggesting a revaluation of American medical practices is warranted.

This work deals with the medical knowledge and beliefs of cultures outside of the United States and Europe. In addition to articles surveying Islamic, Chinese, Native American, Aboriginal Australian, Indian, Egyptian, and Tibetan medicine, the book includes essays on comparing Chinese and western medicine and religion and medicine. Each essay is well illustrated and contains an extensive bibliography.

"Culture counts" has long been a rallying cry among health advocates and policymakers concerned with racial disparities in health care. A generation ago, the women's health movement led to a host of changes that also benefited racial minorities, including more culturally aware medical staff, enhanced health education, and the mandated inclusion of women and minorities in federally funded research. Many health professionals would now agree that cultural competence is important in clinical settings, but in what ways? Shattering Culture provides an insightful view of medicine and psychiatry as they are practiced in today's culturally diverse clinical settings. The book offers a compelling account of the many ways culture shapes how doctors conduct their practices and how patients feel about the care they receive. Based on interviews with clinicians, health care staff, and patients, Shattering Culture shows the human face of health care in America. Building on over a decade of research led by Mary-Jo Good, the book delves into the cultural backgrounds of patients and their health care providers, as well as the institutional cultures of clinical settings, to illuminate how these many cultures interact and shape the quality of patient care. Sarah Willen explores the controversial practice of matching doctors and patients based on a shared race, ethnicity, or language and finds a spectrum of arguments challenging its usefulness, including patients who may fear being judged negatively by providers from the same culture. Seth Hannah introduces the concept of cultural environments of hyperdiversity describing complex cultural identities. Antonio Bullon and Mary-Jo Good demonstrate how regulations meant to standardize the caregiving process—such as the use of templates and check boxes instead of narrative notes—have steadily limited clinician flexibility, autonomy, and the time they can dedicate to caring for patients. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song looks at positive doctor-patient relationships in mental health care settings and finds that the most successful of these are based on mutual "recognition"—patients who can express their concerns and clinicians who validate them. In the book's final essay, Hannah, Good, and Park show how navigating the maze of insurance regulations, financial arrangements, and paperwork compromises the effectiveness of mental health professionals seeking to provide quality care to minority and poor patients. Rapidly increasing diversity on one hand and bureaucratic regulations on the other are two realities that have made providing culturally sensitive care even more challenging for doctors. Few opportunities exist to go inside the world of medical and mental health clinics and see how these realities are influencing patient care. Shattering Culture provides a rare look at the day-to-day experiences of psychiatrists and other clinicians and offers multiple perspectives on what culture means to doctors, staff, and patients and how it shapes the practice of medicine and psychiatry.

Published in 1998, culture forms a complex framework of national, organizational, and professional attitudes and values within which groups and individuals function. The reality and strength of culture become salient when we work within a new group and interact with people who have well established norms and values. In this book the authors report the results of their ongoing exploration of the influences of culture in two professions, aviation and medicine. Their focus is on commercial airline pilots and operating room teams. Within these two environments they show the effect of professional, national and organizational cultures of individual attitudes and values and team interaction.

Doctors are taught how to cure people. But they don’t always know how to care for them. Hardly anyone is happy with American healthcare these days. Patients are getting sicker and going bankrupt from medical bills. Doctors are burning out and making dangerous mistakes. Both parties blame our nation’s outdated and dysfunctional healthcare system. But that’s only part of the problem. In this important and timely book, Dr. Robert Pearl shines a light on the unseen and often toxic culture of medicine. Today’s physicians have a surprising disdain for technology, an unhealthy obsession with status, and an increasingly complicated relationship with their patients. All of this can be traced back to their earliest experiences in medical school, where doctors inherit a set of norms, beliefs, and expectations that shape almost every decision they make, with profound consequences for the rest of us. Uncaring draws an original and revealing portrait of what it’s actually like to be a doctor. It illuminates the complex and intimidating world of medicine for readers, and in the end offers a clear plan to save American healthcare.

Spirituality and Religion Within the Culture of Medicine provides a comprehensive evaluation of the relationship between spirituality, religion, and medicine evaluating current empirical research and academic scholarship. In Part 1, the book examines the relationship of religion, spirituality, and the practice of medicine by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the most recent empirical research of religion/spirituality within twelve distinct fields of medicine including pediatrics, psychiatry, internal medicine, surgery, palliative care, and medical ethics. Written by leading clinician researchers in their fields, contributors provide case examples and highlight best practices when engaging religion/spirituality within clinical practice. This is the first collection that assesses how the medical context interacts with patient spirituality recognizing crucial differences between contexts from obstetrics and family medicine, to nursing, to gerontology and the ICU. Recognizing the interdisciplinary aspects of spirituality, religion, and health, Part 2 of the book turns to academic scholarship outside the field of medicine to consider cultural dimensions that form clinical practice. Social-scientific, practical, and humanity fields include psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, history, philosophy, and theology. This is the first time in a single volume that readers can reflect on these multi-dimensional, complex issues with contributions from leading scholars. In Part III, the book concludes with a synthesis, identifying the best studies in the field of religion and health, ongoing weaknesses in research, and highlighting what can be confidently believed based on prior studies. The synthesis also considers relations between the empirical literature on religion and health and the theological and religious traditions, discussing places of convergence and tension, as well as remainingopen questions for further reflection and research. This book will provide trainees and clinicians with an introduction to the field of spirituality, religion, and medicine, and its multi-disciplinary approach will give researchers and scholars in the field a critical and up-to-date analysis.

From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered in field research in Taiwan and, to a lesser extent, from materials gathered in similar research in Boston. The reader will find this book contains a dialectical tension between two reciprocally related orientations: it is both a cross-cultural (largely anthropological) perspective on the essential components of clinical care and a clinical perspective on anthropological studies of medicine and psychiatry. That dialectic is embodied in my own academic training and professional life, so that this book is a personal statement. I am a psychiatrist trained in anthropology. I have worked in library, field, and clinic on problems concerning medicine and psychiatry in Chinese culture. I teach cross-cultural psychiatry and medical anthropology, but I also practice and teach consultation psychiatry and take a clinical approach to my major cross-cultural teaching and research involvements. The theoretical framework elaborated in this book has been applied to all of those areas; in turn, they are used to illustrate the theory. Both the theory and its application embody the same dialectic. The purpose of this book is to advance both poles of that dialectic: to demonstrate the critical role of social science (especially anthropology and cross-cultural studies) in clinical medicine and psychiatry and to encourage study of clinical problems by anthropologists and other investigators involved in cross-cultural research. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980. From the Preface, by Arthur Kleinman: Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture presents a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between medicine, psychiatry, and culture. That framework is principally illustrated by materials gathered