As a traditional healing art that has established a contemporary global presence, Chinese medicine defies categories and raises many interesting questions. If Chinese medicine is "traditional," why has it not disappeared with the rest of traditional Chinese society? If, as some claim, it is a science, what does that imply about what we call science? What is the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper for more than 2,000 years? In Chinese Medi...

Traditional East Asian healthcare systems have moved rapidly from the fringes of healthcare systems in the West towards the centre over the past 50 years. This change of status for traditional medicines presents their practitioners with both opportunities and challenges as the focus shifts from one of opposition towards one of integration into biomedically dominated healthcare systems. Integrating East Asian Medicine into Contemporary Healthcare examines the opportunities and challenges of...

In late imperial China, debates over how virtuosity in medical practice might be cultivated unfolded within a world that connected physicians to scholars, poets, calligraphers, Buddhist monks, Daoist life-cultivation experts and military strategists. This book traces these debates, showing how medicine was imagined as akin to poetry, how clinical insight was shaped through meditative bodily practices and how practitioners pursued empirical investigation. At the same time, medicine and the ...

In cross-cultural health care interactions, there are many situations where communication is challenging because patients and their families exhibit different values, beliefs, and behaviors from those of their American physicians. Physicians educated in western medicine, who work in the health care system in the United States, operate within a highly specific medical culture though they may not even realize how acculturated they have become within that world of medicine.As a result...

Ageing is an activity we are familiar with from an early age. In our younger years upcoming birthdays are anticipated with an excitement that somewhat diminishes as the years progress. As we grow older we are bombarded with advice on ways to overcome, thwart, resist, and, on the rare occasion, embrace, one's ageing. Have all human beings from the various historical epochs and cultures viewed aging with this same ambivalence? In this Very Short Introduction Nancy A. Pachana discuss...

Every year the average number of prescriptions purchased by Americans increases, as do healthcare expenditures, which are projected to reach one-fifth of the U.S. gross domestic product by 2020. In Drugs for Life, Joseph Dumit considers how our burgeoning consumption of medicine and cost of healthcare not only came to be, but also came to be taken for granted. For several years, Dumit attended pharmaceutical industry conferences; spoke with marketers, researchers, doctors, and pat...

For centuries, medicine aimed to treat abnormalities. But today normality itself is open to medical modification. Equipped with a new molecular understanding of bodies and minds, and new techniques for manipulating basic life processes at the level of molecules, cells, and genes, medicine now seeks to manage human vital processes. The Politics of Life Itself offers a much-needed examination of recent developments in the life sciences and biomedicine that have led to the widespread...

With the world's population getting increasingly older, there has never been a more pressing need for the study of old age and ageing. An Introduction to Gerontology provides a wide-ranging introduction to this important topic. By assuming no prior expert knowledge and avoiding jargon, this book will guide students through all the main subjects in gerontology, covering both traditional areas, such as biological and social ageing, and more contemporary areas, such as technology, the arts an...

What implications are applications of new genetic technologies in biomedicine having on social identity in today’s society?New Genetics, New Identities, a wide-ranging multi-disciplinary volume in the CESAGen Genetics & Society Book series, presents not only theoretical reflection but also empirical case studies drawn from an international array of authors. Including the highly controversial areas of reproductive technologies and use of human embryos in biomedical...

Navigates the divergent cultural meanings of health, and its entanglement with morality in current political discourseYou see someone smoking a cigarette and say,“Smoking is bad for your health,” when what you mean is, “You are a bad person because you smoke.” You encounter someone whose body size you deem excessive, and say, “Obesity is bad for your health,” when what you mean is, “You are lazy, unsightly, or weak of will.” You see a woman bottle-feeding an infant...

The Anthropology of Health and Healing provides the first holistic approach to the study of medical anthropology. Over the past two decades, medical anthropology has been the most rapidly growing subfield in anthropology, and a number of medial anthropology texts have been published, focusing primarily on public policy and health care delivery systems. Yet while Anthropologists have researched topics related to medical anthropology for over 100 years, here Womack thoroughly survey...

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.An exploration of how global pharmaceutical products are localized - of what happens when they become ‘glocal’ - this book examines the tensions that exist between a global pharmaceutical market and the locally bounded discourses and regulations encountered as markets are created for new drugs in partic...