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EMILY LeVEEN Project title: "Beliefs and Uses of Alternative Medicine in Middle Class Professional Women" Why and to what extent are Americans turning to non-biomedical health practices to solve their health problems and needs? This question is a very pertinent and interesting one because of the national shift towards wider use of non-biomedical medicine. It is important to medical anthropology because a distinction has often been made between biomedical systems of healing based on Western ideas of science and medicine and ethnomedical systems of healing (which include all other understandings of disease). Research may prove that types of ethnomedicine have become so incorporated in American society that this division between health care no longer exists. This is a crucial link for medical anthropologists to understand culturally defined behaviors that influence health and healing in the United States. Non-biomedical medicine includes vitamins and herbal supplements, aromatherapy, acupuncture, and other non-western originated treatments often considered to be “alternative” medicine. This trend may be seen through the incorporation of a “Center for Alternative Medicine” at the National Institutes of Health, which requires a sizable amount of funding to explore these non-biomedical treatments. The prevalence of the use of these alternative types of therapies reflects dissatisfaction with biomedicine in the United States due to cost, personal contact, or types of treatment. The reasons for non biomedical treatment use in educated women is not well understood, especially not under conditions when the patient may be using such treatment without a pre-existing health problem that she hopes to alleviate (as preventive medicine). Little research has been done that fully addresses the meanings, myths, and understandings on the part of the subjects who use non-biomedical treatments. What role does this type of medicine play in people’s lives? There may be many underlying reasons why people use non-biomedical or “alternative” treatments:
The study population is teachers in the Decatur school district. This population was chosen because teachers intrinsically have a high level of education, health care benefits, and the majority are women. The research will be conducted through qualitative interviews with 25 teachers in City Schools of Decatur and private institutions such as Saint Thomas More. The interview material will be divided into sections dealing with:
This research will obtain qualitative information about teachers and the extent to and reason behind their usage of non-medical therapies. It is intended for a thesis paper that will help understand non-biomedical healthcare trends, what they say about the American belief system, and how they may be better incorporated into modern American society.
"Health Doesn’t
Just Happen: the Time Crunch and Middle-Class Working Mothers’
Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine" |