Rapid advances in high-throughput genome sequencing technologies foreshadow a near-future in which millions of individuals will gain affordable access to their complete genome sequence. This promises to offer unprecedented insights into the fundamental biological nature of ourselves and our species: where we came from, how we begin our lives, how we develop and grow, how we interact with our environment, how we get sick, how we get well, and how we age. Personal genomics is an essential component of the inevitable transition towards personalized health and medicine. As the medical establishment begins to explore and evaluate the role of personal genomics in health and medicine, both clinicians and patients alike will gain from becoming well versed in both the power and the pitfalls of personal genomic information. Furthermore, it is likely that all students of the biomedical sciences will soon be required to gain crucial understanding in the emerging field of personal genomics. Exploring Personal Genomics provides a novel, inquiry-based approach to the understanding and interpretation of the practical, medical, physiological, and societal aspects of personal genomic information. The material is presented in two parts: the first provides readers of all backgrounds with a fundamental understanding of the biology of human genomes, information on how to obtain and understand digital representations of personal genomic data, tools and techniques for exploring the personal genomics of ancestry and genealogy, discovery and interpretation of genetic trait associations, and the role of personal genomics in drug response. The second part offers more advanced readers an understanding of the science, tools, and techniques for investigating interactions between a personal genome and the environment, connecting DNA to physiology, and assessing rare variants and structural variation. This book aims to support undergraduate and graduate studies in medicine, genetics, molecular biology, and bioinformatics. Additionally, the design of the content is such that medical practitioners, professionals working in the biomedical sciences or related fields, and motivated lay individuals interested in exploring their personal genetic data should find it relevant and approachable.

Plants provide the food, shelter, medicines, and biomass that underlie sustainable life. One of the earliest and often overlooked uses of plants is the production of smoke, dating to the time of early hominid species. Plant-derived smoke has had an enormous socio-economic impact throughout human history, being burned for medicinal and recreational purposes, magico-religious ceremonies, pest control, food preservation, and flavoring, perfumes, and incense. In ten illustrated chapters, this global compendium documents and describes approximately 2,000 global uses for over 1,400 plant species. The Uses and Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke is accessibly written and provides a wealth of information not only on human uses, but also on conservation issues and the role of smoke, fire, and heat in promoting seed germination in biodiversity hot spots. Divided into nine main categories of use, the compendium lists plant-derived smoke's the medicinal, historical, ceremonial, ritual and recreational uses. Plant use in the production of incense and to preserve and flavor foods and beverages is also included. Each entry includes full binomial names and family, an identification of the person who named the plant, as well as numerous references to and other scholarly texts. Of particular interest will be plants such as Tobacco (Nicotiana tabaccum), Boswellia spp (frankincense), and Datura stramonium (smoked as a treatment for asthma all over the world), all of which are described in great detail. In addition, this is one of the first ethnobotanical books to include a section on plant conservation. It addresses issues of over-harvest and invasiveness, the two primary conservation concerns with human-exploited species.

The complex, highly problematic, often thorny dynamics of trust and authority are central to the anthropological study of legitimacy. In this book, this sine qua non runs across the in-depth examination of the ways in which healthcare and public health are managed by the authorities and experienced by the people on the ground in urban Europe, the USA, India, Africa, Latin America and the Far and Middle East. This book brings comparatively together anthropological studies on healthcare and public health rigorously based on in-depth empirical knowledge. Inspired by the current debate on legitimacy, legitimation and de-legitimation, the contributions do not refrain from taking into account the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the health systems under study, but carefully avoid letting this issue monopolise the discussion. This book raises key challenges to our understanding of healthcare practices and the governance of public health. With a keen eye on urban life, its inequalities and the ever-expanding gap between rulers and the ruled, the findings address important questions on the complex ways in which authorities gain, keep, or lose the public’s trust.

In a world now filled with more people who are overweight than underweight, public health and medical perspectives paint obesity as a catastrophic epidemic that threatens to overwhelm health systems and undermine life expectancies globally. In many societies, being obese also creates profound personal suffering because it is so culturally stigmatized. Yet despite loud messages about the health and social costs of being obese, weight gain is a seemingly universal aspect of the modern human condition. Grounded in a holistic anthropological approach and using a range of ethnographic and ecological case studies, Obesity shows that the human tendency to become and stay fat makes perfect sense in terms of evolved human inclinations and the physical and social realities of modern life. Drawing on her own fieldwork in the rural United States, Mexico, and the Pacific Islands over the last two decades, Alexandra A. Brewis addresses such critical questions as why obesity is defined as a problem and why some groups are so much more at risk than others. She suggests innovative ways that anthropology and other social sciences can use community-based research to address the serious public health and social justice concerns provoked by the global spread of obesity.

This book explores Native American literary responses to biomedical discourses and biomedicalization processes as they circulate in social and cultural contexts. Native American communities resist reductivism of biomedicine that excludes Indigenous (and non-Western) epistemologies and instead draw attention to how illness, healing, treatment, and genetic research are socially constructed and dependent on inherently racialist thinking. This volume highlights how interventions into the hegemony of biomedicine are vigorously addressed in Native American literature. The book covers tuberculosis and diabetes epidemics, the emergence of Native American DNA, discoveries in biotechnology, and the problematics of a biomedical model of psychiatry. The book analyzes work by Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, LeAnne Howe, Linda Hogan, Heid E. Erdrich, Elissa Washuta and Frances Washburn. The book will appeal to scholars of Native American and Indigenous Studies, as well as to others with an interest in literature and medicine.

Abject Relations presents an alternative approach to anorexia nervosa, long considered the epitome of a Western obsession with individualism, beauty, self-control, and autonomy. Through detailed ethnographic investigations, Megan Warin looks at the heart of what it means to live with anorexia on a daily basis. Participants describe difficulties with social relatedness, not being at home in their body, and feeling disgusting and worthless. For them, anorexia becomes a seductive and empowering practice that cleanses bodies of shame and guilt, becomes a friend and support, and allows them to forge new social relations. Unraveling anorexia's complex relationships and contradictions, Warin constructs a new theoretical perspective rooted in a socio-cultural context of bodies and gender. Abject Relations departs from conventional psychotherapy approaches and offers a different "logic," one that involves the shifting forces of power, disgust, and desire. It provides new ways of thinking that may have implications for future treatment regimes. Megan Warin is a social anthropologist in the Discipline of Gender, Work, and Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide. She has previously worked across anthropology, psychiatry, and public health at various institutions, including Durham University, the University of Adelaide, and Flinders University of South Australia. Praise for Abject Relations: "Warin has taken the topic of anorexia, which many of us feel that we know something about, and brilliantly cast a whole new light on it. Through vivid ethnography and evocative prose, she ensures that you won't think about anorexia or those affected by it in quite the same way ever again."-C. H. Browner, UCLA School of Medicine "Anthropologist Megan Warin combines rich multisited ethnographic research on anorexic women's lived experiences with a sophisticated theoretical approach based on concepts of abjection and relatedness to offer fascinating and original insights into anorexia nervosa."-Carole M. Counihan, author of The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power

Minority populations are often regarded as being 'hard to reach' and evading state expectations of health protection. This ethnographic and archival study analyses how devout Jews in Britain negotiate healthcare services to preserve the reproduction of culture and continuity. This book demonstrates how the transformative and transgressive possibilities of technology reveal multiple pursuits of protection between this religious minority and the state. Making Bodies Kosher advances theoretical perspectives of immunity, and sits at the intersection of medical anthropology, social history and the study of religions.

The popularization of the Internet, due in larger part to the advent of multifunctional cell phones, poses new challenges for health professionals, patients, and caregivers as well as creates new possibilities for all of us. This comprehensive volume analyzes how this social phenomenon is transforming long-established healthcare practices and perceptions in a country with one of the highest numbers of Internet users: Brazil. After an opening text that analyzes the Internet and E-Health Care as a field of study, the book comprises six parts. The first part introduces the emergence and development of the internet in Brazil, its pioneering experience in internet governance, digital inclusion, and online citizen participation. The second part is dedicated to internet health audiences by analyzing the cases of patients, the young, and the elderly seeking and sharing health information online, especially in virtual communities. The third part is dedicated to the challenges that the expansion of the internet in healthcare poses to all of us, such as the evaluation of the quality of health information available online and the prevention of the risks involved with online sales, cyberbullying, and consumption of prescription medicines. The fourth presents some innovative e-learning experiences carried out with different groups in Brazil, while the fifth part analyses some practical applications involving the Internet and health, including studies on M-Health, the Internet of things, serious games and the use of new information and communication technologies in health promotion. The last chapter analyses the future of healthcare in the Internet Age. The authors establish a critical and creative debate with international scholarship on the subject. This book is written in a direct and comprehensible way for professionals, researchers, students of communication and health, as well as for stakeholders and others interested in better understanding the trends and the different challenges related to the social phenomenon of the internet in health.

The field of medical anthropology is a discipline that incorporates the perspective of a wide range of approaches--from anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, physicians, nurses, public health administrators, biologists, and many others, including the general public--to health care. This approach places culture and cultural relativism at the forefront and center of every model, and examines the ethics and fairness of health care issues associated with the African American population.

The author examines data on mortality, census, preventive health, alternative medical practices, clinical research, and intervention from a comprehensive perspective. Finally, fieldwork in a public health department setting provides the medical anthropologist with a unique opportunity to investigate cultural and health issues of a particular population in a public health setting. The author explains the steps and procedures for conducting an applied medical anthropological study, based on his experience doing fieldwork projects over the past 15 years.

This book explores Ireland's Marriage Bar, examining its impact on women's lives and the predominantly feminised nursing profession. Information on the history of nursing and the evolution of the nursing profession tends to focus on critical events or key persons who shaped the profession. What is less known and explored is the women nurses' work experiences or how the world outside the ward affected the nurse and the nursing profession at moments in time. This book takes one of these moments in time, the period of the Marriage Bar, and examines the women nurses' lives and the nursing profession during this period of Ireland's history. It does so by adopting a historical perspective and a lived experience perspective of women who had to negotiate this practice. Fifty years on from the Bar removal, as remnants of this time in Ireland's history remain, legislative and constitutional change are required to right the wrongs of the past.

In the wake of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and health reforms in the 1990s, the majority of sub-Saharan African governments spend less than ten dollars per capita on health annually, and many Africans have limited access to basic medical care. Using a community-level approach, anthropologist Ellen E. Foley analyzes the implementation of global health policies and how they become intertwined with existing social and political inequalities in Senegal. ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" examines qualitative shifts in health and healing spurred by these reforms, and analyzes the dilemmas they create for health professionals and patients alike. It also explores how cultural frameworks, particularly those stemming from Islam and Wolof ethnomedicine, are central to understanding how people manage vulnerability to ill health. While offering a critique of neoliberal health policies, ""Your Pocket Is What Cures You"" remains grounded in ethnography to highlight the struggles of men and women who are precariously balanced on twin precipices of crumbling health systems and economic decline. Their stories demonstrate what happens when market-based health reforms collide with material, political, and social realities in African societies.

A description of the social, educational, and economic impact of living with a neurological genetic disorder, neurofibromatosis 1. The many unpredictable and potentially stigmatizing possible symptoms of NF1, which range from physical disfigurement to severe learning disorders, may have serious consequences in every aspect of daily life. NF1 was for many years wrongly diagnosed as the Elephant Man's Disease.

Ablon examines the psychosocial costs of this misdiagnosis and the ways in which stage, screen, and television parlayed The Elephant Man into the personification of the grimmist extreme of ugliness. This portrayal engendered fear and anxiety for affected persons and their families and also had an impact on the scientific and medical communities. Ablon analyzes the factors that affect individual positive adaptation to NF1 and the demands of American society, and offers suggestions for families, support systems, and health care providers for treatment of affected individuals.

This is the first international study of maternal care and maternal mortality. Over the last two hundred years, different countries developed quite different systems of maternal care. Death in Childbirth is a meticulously researched analysis, firmly grounded in the available statistics, of the evolution of those systems between 1800 and 1950 in Britain, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, and on the continent of Europe. Irvine Loudon examines the effectiveness of various forms of maternal care by means of the measurement of maternal mortality - the number of women who died as a result of childbirth. His scholarly and comprehensive study sets out to answer a number of important questions. What was the relative risk of a home or hospital delivery, or a delivery by a midwife as opposed to a doctor? What was the safest country in which to have a baby, and what were the factors which accounted for enormous international differences? Why, against all expectations, did maternal mortality fail to decline significantly until the late 1930s? Death in Childbirth makes an invaluable contribution to medical and social history.

The universality of health concerns and the complexity of dealing with them makes it increasingly important for professionals in sociology, health care, and policy making to become acquainted with the wide variety of strategies used in different social contexts. Although Israel is in some ways unique in its social problems and its approach to health care, many of its problems resemble those of other societies, and many of its solutions can be applied in other countries. Social Dimensions of Health looks at distinctive aspects of the Israeli health care system, while at the same time drawing comparisons with other societies.

Judith Shuval discusses the health and health behavior of a variety of groups in Israeli society that have not been systematically considered in other analyses: women, the elderly, alternative health care providers, immigrants, and Israeli Arabs. Shuval analyzes the critical influence of ultraorthodox parties on health policy in the context of a tenuously balanced coalition government, and shows how the pervasive conflict between Israel and the Arab world penetrates all aspects of social life, including health. Inequality in health is discussed with special reference to Israeli Arabs. The study concludes with a discussion of what can be learned from the Israeli experience, and how it can best be applied in other social contexts. Social Dimensions of Health will prove useful to scholars, health practitioners, and lay people seeking a broad understanding of the social factors underlying health and health care.

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

This book addresses how skeletons can inform us about behavior by describing skeletal lesions in the Gombe chimpanzees, relating them to known life histories whenever possible, and analyzing demographic patterns in the sample. This is of particular interest to both primatologists and skeletal analysts who have benefited from published data on a smaller, earlier skeletal sample from Gombe. The Gombe skeletal collection is the largest collection of wild chimpanzees with known life histories in existence, and this work significantly expands the skeletal sample from this long-term research site (49 chimpanzees). The book explores topics of general interest to skeletal analysts such as demographic patterns, which injuries leave signs on the skeleton, and rates of healing, and discusses both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the patterning of lesions. The book presents the data in a narrative style similar to that employed in Dr. Goodall's seminal work The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Readers already familiar with the Gombe chimpanzees are likely to appreciate summaries of life events correlated to observable skeletal features. The book is especially relevant at this time to remind primate conservationists of the importance of the isolated chimpanzee population at Gombe National Park as well as the availability of the skeletons for study, both within the park itself as well as at the University of Minnesota.

Based on extensive field research, the essays in this volume illuminate the experiences of migrants from their own point of view, providing a critical understanding of the complex social reality in which each experience is grounded. Access to medical care for migrants is a fundamental right which is often ignored. The book provides a critical understanding of the social reality in which social inequalities are grounded and offers the opportunity to show that right to health does not correspond uniquely with access to healthcare.

The age-friendly community movement is a global phenomenon, currently growing with the support of the WHO and multiple international and national organizations in the field of aging. Drawing on an extensive collection of international case studies, this volume provides an introduction to the movement. The contributors - both researchers and practitioners - touch on a number of current tensions and issues in the movement and offer a wide-ranging set of recommendations for advancing age-friendly community development. The book concludes with a call for a radical transformation of a medical and lifestyle model of aging into a relational model of health and social/individual wellbeing.

This unique book applies concepts from the field of anthropology to clinical settings to result in a powerful and dynamic model/theory of clinical anthropology. These clinical settings could include hospitals, police and probation situations, individual and marriage and family counseling, as well as cross-cultural issues, governmental policy, and other instances of educational delivery of concepts and behaviors that allow individuals/groups to reduce stress and move toward personal/group health. In addition to appealing to anthropology and other social/behavioral science scholars, this book will be useful to clinicians of many specialities within Western biomedicine including physicians, nurses, and health care administrators.

This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

Focussing ethnographically on private-sector maternity care in South Africa, Privileges of Birth looks at the ways healthcare and childbirth are shaped by South Africa's racialised history. Birth is one of the most medicalised aspects of the lifecycle across all sectors of society, and there is deep division between what the privileged can afford compared with the rest of the population. Examining the ethics of care in midwife-attended birth, the author situates the argument in the context of a growing literature on care in anthropological and feminist scholarship, offering a unique account of birthing care in the context of elite care services.

Zopf provides a comprehensive account of the biological components of mortality, its various forms and causes, and its many differentials. The study considers mortality among a range of populations, according to differentials such as age, gender, race, ethnic origin, socioeconomic and marital status, and urban or non-urban residence. It also traces changes in the impact of degenerative afflictions, infectious and parasitic diseases, and environmental factors. The result is a current and comprehensive treatment of changes in mortality and its causes in the United States. The many graphs and tables present succinct and clear evidence of current mortality trends, and the extensive bibliography adds to the usefulness of this work as a research tool. The text begins with an introductory overview of the components of mortality and the methods of measuring it. The following chapter analyzes mortality within the general population according to specific differentials. The study then treats patterns, trends, and causes of infant mortality. Zopf next considers the prevalence of several causes of death among different demographic groups, and he examines life expectancy for particular populations. A concluding chapter synthesizes the wealth of information contained within this work. Demographers, sociologists, and health professionals will find this volume a valuable addition to their libraries.

Over the years, impairment has been discussed in bioarchaeology, with some scholars providing carefully contextualized explanations for their causes and consequences. Such investigations typically take a case study approach and focus on the functional aspects of impairments. However, these interpretations are disconnected from disability theory discourse. Other social sciences and the humanities have far surpassed most of anthropology (with the exception of medical anthropology) in their integration of social theories of disability. This volume has three goals: The first goal of this edited volume is to present theoretical and methodological discussions on impairment and disability. The second goal of this volume is to emphasize the necessity of interdisciplinarity in discussions of impairment and disability within bioarchaeology. The third goal of the volume is to present various methodological approaches to quantifying impairment in skeletonized and mummified remains. This volume serves to engage scholars from many disciplines in our exploration of disability in the past, with particular emphasis on the bioarchaeological context.

What does it mean to be a man in our biomedical day and age? Through ethnographic explorations of the everyday lives of Danish sperm donors, Being a Sperm Donor explores how masculinity and sexuality are reconfigured in a time in which the norms and logics of (reproductive) biomedicine have become ordinary. It investigates men's moral reasoning regarding donation, their handling of transgressive experiences at the sperm bank, and their negotiations of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and relatedness, showing how the socio-cultural and political dimensions of (reproductive) biomedicine become intertwined with men's intimate sense of self.

How does the need to obtain and deliver health services engender particular (im)mobility forms? And how is mobility experienced and imagined when it is required for healthcare access or delivery? Guided by these questions, Healthcare in Motion explores the dynamic interrelationship between mobility and healthcare, drawing on case studies from across the world and shedding light on the day-to-day practices of patients and professionals.