Cross-Cultural Views in Healthcare

Cross-Cultural Views in 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, Brazili...