When Culture Impacts Health

Book excerpt: Bringing the hard-to-quantify aspects of lived experience to analysis, and emphasizing what might be lost in interventions if cultural insights are absent, this book includes case studies from across the Asia and Pacific regions –Bangladesh, Malaysia, New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Tuvalu and the Cook Islands. When Culture Impacts Health offers conceptual, methodological and practical insights into understanding and successfully mediating cultural influences to address old and new public health issues including safe water delivery, leprosy, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and body image. It contains useful methodological tools – how to map cultural consensus, measure wealth capital, conduct a cultural economy audit, for example. It provides approaches for discerning between ethnic and racial constructs and for conducting research among indigenous peoples. The book will be indispensible for culture and health researchers in all regions. - Discusses global application of case descriptions - Demonstrates how a cultural approach to health research enriches and informs our understanding of intractable public health problems - Covers methods and measurements applicable to a variety of cultural research approaches as well as actual research results - Case studies include medical anthropology, cultural epidemiology, cultural history and social medicine perspectives