healthcare
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Notes on the book “Twice Dead” by Margaret Lock
This book presents an extensive review of the history and development of one of the most controversial medical practices – organ transplants. In fact, it would be fair to say that the book is not really about organ transplants but about the reinvention of death in the relatively new term “brain death”. Lock describes the making of this term, it’s popularization, the debates that surround it, and its cultural impact. Having worked for another project in Japan, Lock had an opportunity to research the issue of brain death there. This book provides a sort of comparison between the way the topic is approached in North America and in Japan. We…
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Notes on the book by Puchalski, C. M., Ferrell, B. “Making Health Care Whole: Integrating Spirituality into Patient Care”
This book is created on the basis of the national conference, where spiritual and palliative care experts gathered to discuss guidelines for incorporating spirituality into palliative care. The question is vital as in the past years there has been more and more attention given to the role of spirituality within palliative care, its necessary part in caring for ill and dying patients. Simply recognizing the importance of addressing spiritual issues in healthcare proves not to be enough, and the healthcare professionals need to be educated specifically on what spirituality is and how spiritual care should be delivered. The book “Making Health Care Whole” is meant to provide necessary definitions of…
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Notes on the book by Anne Fadiman “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”
The book “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” raises many issues, including the cultural barriers, their impact on health care, immigration, racism, laws and rules, and many more. While the book is really about the collision of two systems – the system of medical care in United States and the world system of the Hmong population, it is also about the deeper reasons for the problems that rose in this story. A lot of the Hmong character, brave and noncompliant, is demonstrated through the history of the Hmong people, their involvement in the “American” war (where it was seen as an advantage), their belief that the U.S. is…
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Notes on the book by Fazlur Rahman “Health and Medicine in the Islamic Tradition”
In his book Fazlur Rahman provides a thorough exploration of the way medicine had grown and had been used in the Islamic world. To do this he begins with the introduction to the history of Islam. Throughout this book we find that the relationship between Islam and medicine has been complex and uneven and it continues to be this way in our times. To understand this relationship the author provides a clear explanation of a Muslim point of view on the topics related to illness and medicine and historical facts that have influenced these views, such as general fatalism of the adepts of Islam and the orthodox anti-intellectualism. At the…
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Notes on “Healing Logics” edited by Erica Brady
This book is a collection of essays that was put together after the Utah State University’s conference on folk medicine, which made it evident that existing models of investigation and research proved to be limiting in exploration of the health belief systems that exist in multitude in the US. The general conclusion of this conference (and the collection of essays) is that these health belief systems are built on the bases of very diverse sources of authority, such as community and ethnic tradition, spiritual beliefs, personal experience, and persecutions of the formal medicine. Through the essays we can observe the relationship between these systems of authority being competing, conflicting, and…
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Notes on the book by M.C.Brannigan “Cultural Faultlines in Healthcare: Reflections on Cultural Competency”
This book is meant to draw the readers’ attention to the problems of providing the sensitive care to the patients within American health care system. Brannigan describes the problems caused by the diversity of worldview and values among the patients and doctors that meet through the health care system. The differences in approaches and understandings are causing what he calls cultural faultlines, the divisive issues that cause misunderstandings and create obstacles for better care. This outstanding problem is further fuelled by the fact that the American society in general has grown a profound distrust of the healthcare. Having described the essential problem, the author proposes a solution. He believes that…
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Notes on the book “Modern and Global Ayurveda : Pluralism and Paradigms”
Modern and Global Ayurveda is a collection of papers presented at a 2004 conference convened by the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research at the University of Cambridge edited by Dagmar Wujastyk, an independent scholar in Indology at the University of Bonn and Frederick M. Smith, Professor of Sanskrit and Classical Indian Religions at the University of Iowa. This book briefly touches the history of Ayurveda and then explores in detail its development in the modern times, its coexistence with classical western medicine, the ideological differences between the “ancient” and modern ways of teaching and practice, its growth in the West and it’s new appearance back in India. In other…
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Notes on the article by Joseph A. Adepoju “A Study of Health Beliefs and Practices of the Yoruba”
The study presented in the article describes in full the dualistic approach to treating illness. We see how the spiritual and physical treatments become complementary to each other within the Yoruba community. This approach is common not only for the immigrant community but also to the Yoruba living in Nigeria – there are always two sides seen in an illness – a physical and a spiritual, and both must be treated with equal importance. The holistic approach to healing in the Yoruba community is described in the quote below: “The practice of magic and medicine is comprehensive and holistic in nature and encompasses the healing of the body, mind and…
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Notes on the article by David R. Hodge “Working with Hindu Clients in a Spiritually Sensitive Manner”
The article was written first of all for social workers who may encounter Hindu consumers. In order to facilitate a minimum cultural sensitivity Hodge makes an attempt to summarise Hindu cosmology. He explains such central to Hindu religion concepts as dharma, karma, moksha, and the non-self-centred view on life of the Hindu population. He then demonstrates how some traditional Hindu ways of life may be different from the western mentality and, thus, would be often met with prejudice and judgement. For example, the sacred dharma that prescribes different roles for women and men is referred to an “ideology” that serves to “camouflage injustice” while deceiving women into desiring a position…
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Notes on article by N. E. Conner and L. S. Eller “Spiritual perspectives, needs and nursing interventions of Christian African–Americans”
The article concludes that “the potential for spiritual care to influence both the psychological and physiological health of patients either directly or indirectly speaks to the urgency of providing patients with appropriate spiritual assessment and interventions” (631). I found this to be the most important part of the article, because while the authors had chosen to explore one subgroup as an example of the spiritual needs of the patients, this conclusion refers to all patients. “Respondents also wrote in their need for nurses to pray with and share personal beliefs with them. We found that 41% of desired spiritual nursing interventions were related to nurses’ direct participation in spiritual activities,…