Anthropo-medical orientation: reflections on medical anthropology and cultural riddle

ABSTRACT

Cultures globally are man-made survival strategy on responding to various environmental, ecological demographical, topographical, geographical, political, social, psychological and economic factors for diversity. The point raised here is if the nature accepts the diversity due to which the living styles, languages, dressing, and other related aspects of aesthetics then why don't human accept socio-cultural diversity. The paper focuses its discussion on medical anthropology. Anthropologists have long been involved in studying the health systems of various societies that they choose for research. The understandings of various cultures and its medical practices helped anthropologists to understand why people prefer to have a unique and indigenous thought patterns as regards health notions and practices. Pakistan being a member of third world brethren still holds its position among the conventional medicalization. National life is divided into various strands of medical belief system and thus practices regarding diagnosis, curing, treatments, rehabilitation. Health bureaucracy blindly follows the Western medical approaches upon which there are intellectual debates internationally to accept the cultural notions in order to improve the global indicators while accepting the local cultures and their interpretations on such vital aspects of man's civilized life. There is a need to reiterate the health policy as well as the brain set of medical care systems to give the cultural perceptions and thus medical anthropology a due role in deciphering the dream into a reality. This paper attempts to educate the readers about the importance of cultural factors in understanding the disease, illness and healing in cultural setting and also to discuss the role of ethno-medicine that has been acknowledged throughout the world