articles
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Notes on the article by A.Viladrich “Beyond the Supernatural: Latino Healers Treating Latino Immigrants in NYC”
The article explores the role of Latino folk healers in adequately addressing immigrants’ health needs, including their potential to complement or replace formal access to health care services. “More than competing with other healing businesses, [Latino healers] are filling a gap by providing cultural meaningful treatments while satisfying Latinos’ unmet needs…. Botanicas offer personalized response to problems that would either receive little attention or remain unattended otherwise”(p. 144) This quote states an important point – that besides the actual healing practice, besides the ceremonies and selling the herbal supplements, the botanicas provide the necessary spiritual care to patients, who would not be able to receive this care anywhere else. This…
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Notes on article by S. Saha, MD et al. “Patient Centeredness, Cultural Competence and Healthcare Quality”
While the patient centerdness (PC) and cultural competence (CC) essentially have developed from two different focus points, they both aim at improving the quality of healthcare. The people who have worked on the development of the models essentially seemed to have similar understanding of the values of the World and and followed similar intentions to help patients feel better not only on a physical level. “Just as proponents of cultural competence might embrace most aspects of patient centeredness, it is likely that propo- nents of patient centeredness would also embrace these additional features of cultural competence. “ p.1281 This quote sums up this idea – that to be a proponent…
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Notes on the article by by E-shien Chang et al. “Integrating cultural humility into health care professional education and training.”
The article talks about the necessity to expand cultural sensitivity with the emphasis on cultural humility. The authors brings us several examples of how important cultural humility is and how destructive its lack can be. They make a strong point in that the model they are proposing (QIAN model) would allow to correct some faults in patient care such as imbalance of power, which often prevents completely open communication and thus does not allow the doctor to see the full picture. The inclusive nature of this model is adaptable to different cultural and ethnic groups and can be used to enhance cross-cultural communication skills of very different healthcare professionals. While…
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Notes on the article by by Patricia J. Kelly, PhD et al. “Exploring the Theoretical Framework of Cultural Competency Training”
The article explores the theoretical frameworks of cultural competency training for Physician Assistants. It discusses the importance of such training, the main theories of health care cultural competency, and a brief history of its implementation. They propose shifting the view of cultural competency training from being one of the additional topics in the curriculum of medical students to being one of the foundation courses. The authors explain that teaching cultural norms and exposing the students to cultural diversity will not train the students how to appropriately elicit cultural information from patients. They point out that such authors as Shapiro, Lie, Gutierrez, and Zhung have discovered that medical students “tend to…
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Notes on the article by William R. LaFleur “Body”
“Critical Terms for Religious Studies” edited by Mark C. Taylor This work is dedicated to the exploration of the relationship between religion and body. First of all, LaFleur provides a short overview on the history of this relationship. We see that while most cultured initially insisted on accepting our bodies the way they were (given to us by God), there have also been many physical alterations made to the bodies throughout history on the basis of religious belief. While Christianity has been taking pride in being the one religion that does not promote any changes in the body, it was the first one to apply the term corpses, meaning that…
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Notes on “Shattering Culture: American Medicine Responds to Cultural Diversity” by Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good (Editor) et al.
The world is changing, the people are moving, the demographics are being reshaped, especially in the US where there are so many immigrants. This book presents a collection of works that describe how are health-care institutions responding to this changing demographics, including issues within the institutional policies and the personal human dilemmas in serving the diverse and constantly changing group of patients. Although it is clear that cultural diversity often covaries with racial and ethnic classifications, we must remember that cultural diversity can exist within ethnic groups as well, and other dimensions of culture (such as those deriving from class background or education). Through various examples we are shown that…