Essentials of Health, Culture, and Diversity

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    With diversity, including cultural diversity, increasingly becoming the norm, it has become even more essential for students and those planning to work in public health to have more than a cursory understanding of the important cultural dimension of the human societies and groups with whom they'll be partners.

    Essentials of Health, Culture, and Diversity: Understanding People, Reducing Disparities, Second Edition examines what is meant by culture and the ways in which culture intersects with health issues, and explores how public health efforts can benefit by understanding and working with cultural processes.

    Using a range of conceptual tools and research methods, this text provides an overview of specific domains where culture and health intersect, including varying definitions of health/well-being; understandings of health risk; illness causation and treatment theories (ethnomedical systems); healing/curing traditions; the relationship between health risk (vulnerability) and socio-cultural structures; gender and health; and the meaning of 'cultural competency.'

     

    SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

    Section I  Culture and the Human Condition-An Introduction
    Ch 1 There Is Health, and There Is Health . . .
    Ch 2 The Starting Point: Defining Culture, Defining Health
    Section II  Tools and Perspectives for Understanding the Relationship Between Culture and Health
    Ch 3 Ethnomedicine I: Cultural Health Systems of Related Knowledge and Practice
    Ch 4 Ethnomedicine II: Cultural Systems of Psychology and Mental/Emotional Health
    Ch 5 The Moral Dimension: The Relationship of Etiology to Morality in Cultural Beliefs and Practices Related to Health
    Ch 6 Culture, Healers, and the Institutions of Health
    Ch 7 Sociocultural Ecologies of Disease and Illness
    Ch 8 Culture, Subculture, and Constructions of Health Risk
    Section III  Applying Concepts of Cultural Diversity to Health Promotion
    Ch 9 The Dimensions of Culture in a Sampling of Current Public Health Challenges
    Ch 10 A Primer on Research Strategies to Obtain Cultural Information
    Ch 11 Incorporating Cultural Knowledge in Health Promotion Interventions, with Selected Examples
    Ch 12 Wrapping Up: Being Culturally Competent
    Case 1 Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Its Interpretations
    Case 2 Fighting Indigenous Historical Trauma as a Health Intervention: The Case of the Traditional Foods Program to Address Disproportionate Diabetes Risk