Case Study on Healthcare

As a member of a dominantly ethnocentric American culture, it is easy to never ponder on the validity of non-scientific based or “factual” healthcare diagnoses and practices. However, American or western medicinal techniques are equally as inflected with cultural biases as systems more seemingly exotic or spiritually based. If this were not the case, hospital and medical care professional’s web sites would not contain links to policies on cultural, spiritual and religious sensitivity or information pages on American ethnocentrism in healthcare. A basic anthropological understanding of cross-cultural differences is evidently the frame for the provision of healthcare to patients who belong to non-dominant cultures. Religion and spiritual beliefs play a vastly important role in beliefs concerning truths and non-truths in healthcare across the world. In this paper I will be looking at several different case studies looking at Hmong, Brazilian, Japanese, American and Native American cultural beliefs in healthcare.

In North East Brazil in a village called Alto do Cruzeiro, babies die of a phenomena that is virtually unthinkable in wealthy western nations. The babies are dying of selective maternal neglect. However, this is not as straight forward as infanticide. It is far more complex and supported by cultural back-ups that have been created out of desperate necessity. Nancy Sheper-Hughes, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Berkeley did revealed heart-wrenching truths about infant mortality in the disease ridden and poverty-stricken region of N.E. Brazil. Her case study was focused on Alto do Cruzeiro where she looked at the overwhelming rate of infant mortality and investigated the consequent affect of these deaths on the culture. Due to the difficulty Sheper-Hughes had in finding out the number of infant deaths that occurred in the past year, many questions arose. When asking a producer of pauper coffins how many infant coffins he made the previous year, he frankly responded that he did not keep track because nobody cares. This kind of casual attitude, an attitude that exudes normalcy to the huge death tolls, is a cultural condition, an escape hatch created as a coping mechanism for something so terrible. This information helps to explain the truths that the mothers of Alto stand by; a child “ill-fated for life [is] better off dead” (Sheper-Hughes). How does such a truth come to exist? If the chances of a baby dying are greater than its surviving, maternal love cannot begin with the deliverance of the newborn. The birth of a newborn is hardly a time of rejoicing (Sheper-Hughes).