Health & Healing in Cross Cultural Perspective - Essay Example

[Your full July 8, Questions One adaptation that has been discussed in Chapter 3 is that the health care provider must adapt himself in such a way that he deals with the patient of other culture with competence. This is called cultural competence that is required to solve intercultural conflicts and noncompliance that usually occurs when the patients feel that their issues are not being understood or when they do not feel at ease with the provider. This requires the provider to communicate with the patient effectively through the use of interpreters in case of language barriers; mediators in case of intercultural conflicts; and a culturally acceptable social interaction strategy to negotiate the differences with the patients.

Hence, interpersonal skills become a necessity and these skills include language competency, conflict resolution plan, and understanding the other culture’s customs and requirements. 2. A clinically applied anthropologist can help a patient receive better health care by addressing the problems arising due to cross-cultural barriers at personal and organizational level. This is important to adapt with the patients of the other culture. An anthropologist must be able to solve intercultural and cross-cultural conflicts by having a deep understanding of culture’s emic perspective which means that he must know what the patients of the same culture think about themselves and what beliefs that have been brought up with.

He should understand cultural relativism so that the behavior of patients seem meaningful to him. He should be able to evaluate his own judgments and revise them according to the other culture’s perspective. Along with emic perspective, he must also be able to understand the etic perspective of the cultures and must be able to comprehend a disease as a universally acceptable condition. 3. Cultural competency means that the provider must be able to comprehend the other culture’s behavioral and relational expectations along with adjusting to the other culture’s belief system, and distinguish between cultural patterns and their variations that occur between generations, classes, genders, and races of the same culture.

Sometimes, a culture is often wrongly stereotyped and all people belonging to the same culture are stereotyped as being the same. An anthropologist must know how to identify and deal with the behavioral variations that occur within the same culture because people within the same culture may sometimes hold different expectations from the provider. 4. It is a dilemma of our society that it stereotypes the children as mentally retarded who belong to the non-dominant culture due to which they are not able to perceive and respond to the social interactions that they experience at school.

The biomedical model states that to identify a person as mentally retarded, he must have an underlying physical defect in his brain. This is a common phenomena in public schools that cross-cultural interactions are not encouraged due to which children of the other cultures feel uncomfortable and isolated. School authorities should take appropriate measures to make such children feel at ease so that they are accepted as normal children just like their peers at school. There is need to create an awareness among teachers, parents and students so that cross-cultural social interactions are promoted.