Medical Anthropology Paper

This paper seeks to examine the cultural aspects of health and why medical anthropologists emphasize the need for local knowledge of culture to critically tackle human health. Medical anthropology is one of the major subfields of anthropology. It aims to understand the factors that influences health including biological and socio-cultural factors. The job of medical anthropologist is to determine the cultural aspects of diagnosis and disease treatment. In essence, there are three major arguments shared by medical anthropologists include that culture shapes biology as stated by Margaret Lock during interview on CBC radio. Also, culture plays a definitive role in interpreting health symptoms. And finally, people around the world have acquired the necessary knowledge to help maintain their health.
In her study examining the differences on how menopause is experienced in North America and Japan, Margaret Locke argues and disputes the claim that women’s experience of different experience of menopause in different places is purely biological. Instead Margaret suggests that culture shapes how people interpret these symptoms. It was also determined that the western definition of menopause is far too limiting, as it focused on the
These include historical and environmental influences, dietary practices, marital and reproductive practices that vary from part of the world to the other. As a result, hypothesis has been developed and it suggested that the environment influences biology and biology is not a static entity. This hypothesis contributed to the study of epigenetics. Epigenetics studies the interaction between genes and the environment. Despite the evolutionary theory that states acquired characteristics may be passed on from generation to generation, various medical anthropologists have asked themselves “Can genes be transmitted through