No description available.

Beginning with the diagnosis of nymphomania in the 19th Century, there has been widespread and continued interest across the mental health and bio-medical realm of what constitutes normality of female sexual behavior, and of the boundary at which sexual desire is deemed to be excessive, and thus abnormal. However, research questions that specifically investigate the subjective female voice and perspective in considerations of so-called hypersexuality or sex addiction remain understudied. This research project proposes to examine the cultural pathways and systemic foundations which have historically in the West problematized female sexuality by investigating women's own perceptions of sexual addiction and their experiences in seeking (or not) addiction treatment. In addition, this research project proposes to investigate the perceptions of therapists (psychologists and psychiatrists) who treat hypersexual female patients, in order to examine their beliefs about the cultural and biological genesis of the disorder, and its appearance in female patients. Theoretically, this project aims to move away from the concept of individualized bodies suffering singularly from (dis)ease and abnormality, and investigate the ways in which Western cultural notions of normal female sexuality shape women's self-perceptions and notions about sexual deviance.

The conception of illness and healing in contemporary Mexican Catholic discourse highlights both particular and ubiquitous instances of a health experience perceived locally and widespread. Catholic healing masses are utilized as supplemental methods of individual health restoration coupled with Western medicinal techniques in Catholic dramas. Aside from the spiritual and religious significance of this practice, the use of healing masses as an additional means to achieving an optimal health status implies that something is lacking in current biomedical models. The purpose of my research is to explore the humanistic terms under which healing masses operate and translate these terms into a biomedical conversation towards enhanced secular medical care.

No description available.

In 2019, a major academic medical center released a public health research report on life expectancies in Texas organized by zip code. The study revealed that the 76104-zip code, part of the central area of the city of Fort Worth, has the lowest life expectancy in the entire state. Concerned about the life expectancy study statistics, New Mount Rose Baptist Church, affiliated churches, and other community members sought to understand better why the life expectancy in their area was so low. This exploratory study uses a mixed-methods approach that incorporates interviews, a survey, and participant observation to help understand (i) how community members in the area feel, think about, and relate to their community, (ii) what the major social determinants of health are for them, and (iii) what health-related infrastructures in the area are lacking or need improvement. This study unearths perceptions of health and community from the various communities in the area and social and structural determinants of health in 76104.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This study is about young people (age 11-16) with diabetes. Based on fieldwork in a paediatric diabetes centre in Scotland, it describes the ways diabetes is lived and done by young people, their health carers and insulin pumps. This enactment is contrasted with other ways of doing diabetes, as observed on short fieldwork trips to paediatric centres in Brussels, Gothenburg and Boston. I explore the dynamics of diabetes care on two levels. I consider the interaction between health carers and patients. Comparative data from various paediatric centres make apparent how culturally and socially informed approaches towards adolescence, health and illness shape both care practices and patients' experiences, resulting in different medical outcomes. Concretely in the Scottish centre, a non-hierarchical holistic care approach by health carers emphasizing quality of life over health, informs the young people's perspective on diabetes. Being a free adolescent takes priority over managing diabetes, with the results of ill health and possible future complications. The existing dynamics in this care framework change as a third actor enters the scene: the insulin pump, a pager-sized technological device continuously attached to the body. I explore the balancing act between young people and their pumps. As the adolescents actively engage with their pumps not to search for better health but rather to pursue a better quality of life, the guiding question becomes: how can a technological device for insulin injection double as a tool towards a desired identity and a different illness? This work then, can be read as a concrete case study of how a uniform technological device is embedded and used in a specific cultural and social context. It can also be read as an argument for a re-orientation of paediatric diabetes care in the Scottish centre: care centred on collaboration and inclusion rather than focused on merely containing underlying conflict (between adults and adolescents, diabetes and life, health and quality of life). Centres in Brussels, Gothenburg and Boston, and the insulin pump concretely, show how collaboration can lead to good health and quality of life. To leave us to wonder: is 'doing diabetes differently' synonymous with 'doing a different diabetes'?

This thesis is concerned with plants, chronic illness and medicine in Oku, Northwest Region, Cameroon. I focus on patient strategies to obtain effective medical outcomes, and on how such outcomes may be obtained through seeking traditional medicine in Oku. I argue that biomedical notions of efficacy do not appropriately represent the central and diverse roles that plants play in traditional medicine nor do they correctly represent how people in Oku evaluate the efficacy of plant-based traditional medicine. I argue instead that efficacy must be understood in terms of the emic concept of power. This power is understood to be located in the Oku landscape, which is still uniquely forested and said to embody powerful ancestral spirits. With plants as the primary tangible material of power, and traditional doctors in Oku as those who claim exclusive rights to manipulate and disperse such power, I discuss traditional medicine in Oku as a system wherein power from the natural landscape is drawn upon to challenge harmful powers feared to derive from the social arena. Using the pragmatic and phenomenological approaches, I show how patients evaluate the efficacy of a medical treatment based on their bodily experiences, and how their actions, as revealed in their therapeutic trajectories, reveal their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a given diagnosis and/or therapy. I discuss how enduring illness generates and exacerbates bodily, treatment-outcome, social, and psychological uncertainties. In this context, effective outcomes can be understood as those which address and limit these uncertainties and anxieties while offering ways to imagine hopeful prognoses. This thesis then outlines the major sources of uncertainty, people’s responses to such uncertainties, and what people might achieve in terms of limiting uncertainties by seeking traditional medicine in Oku.

Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Paarl, in the Western Cape, has been identified as one of the 15 national sites where antiretroviral treatment (ARVs) would be made available to people living with HIV/AIDS. Paarl Hospice initiated a support group for people to deal with this disease in 2003. Since February 2004 Paarl Hospice has been recruiting people from the surrounding informal settlements for ARVs. By means of participant observation I explored how HIV/AIDS-related disclosure experiences unfolded in places, spaces and events associated with the support group in the context of factors enabling and preventing people from accessing Hospice House. I did this by considering the insights drawn from an anthropological approach. I found the meanings of disclosure in the majority of studies to be limited and restricted. Available studies approached disclosure in a top-down fashion by regarding the definition of disclosure as the announcement of HIV-positivity at the time of diagnosis only. These studies have not considered social differences relating to disclosure neither did they focus on the actual process of disclosure. By means of a constructivist approach to grounded theory I seek to broaden the definition of disclosure to account for the range of ways in which disclosure practices take place. I found that disclosure could not be separated from the situational context in which it occurs and that it can only be understood in relation to the circumstances and relationships in which it takes place. In this study, disclosure was an ongoing process, situated somewhere between active, public announcement of an HIV-status and complete secrecy and somewhere between voluntary and involuntary revealing of the disease. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Paarl in die Wes-Kaap is geïdentifiseer as een van die 15 nasionale areas waar antiretrovirale medikasie beskikbaar gestel sou word aan mense wat leef met MIV/VIGS. Paarl Hospice het gedurende 2003 ʼn ondersteuningsgroep geїnisieer om aan MIV/VIGS aandag te gee. Sedert Februarie 2004 is Paarl Hospice in die proses om mense te werf uit die omliggende informele behuisingsgebiede vir antiretrovirale behandeling. Met behulp van antropologiese insigte en deelnemende waarneming kon ek nagaan hoe verskillende maniere van MIV/VIGS-verwante bekendmaking ontvou in plekke, ruimtes en gebeurtenisse wat verband hou met die ondersteuningsgroep. MIV/VIGSverwante bekendmaking is ondersoek te midde van inhiberende en fasiliterende faktore wat mense verhoed of aanhelp om Paarl Hospice te besoek. Ek het bevind dat die definisie van bekendmaking in die meeste navorsing gebrekkig is. Beskikbare navorsing het bekendmaking volgens ‘n bo-na-onder-wyse benader as die openbare bekendmaking van ‘n MIV-status na afloop van diagnose alleenlik. Met behulp van ‘n konstruktiewe benadering van die begronde teorie het ek gepoog om die definisie van bekendmaking uit te bou om sodoende die verskeidenheid maniere waarop bekendmaking plaasvind te akkommodeer. Ek het vasgestel dat bekendmaking onlosmaakbaar deel is van die situasionele konteks waarin dit plaasvind en dat dit slegs begryp kan word in verband tot die verhoudings en omstandighede waarin dit plaasvind. In hierdie studie was bekendmaking ʼn voortdurende proses, gesitueer tussen aktiewe openbare bekendmaking en volledige geheimhouding van ʼn MIVstatus, asook tussen volkome vrywillige en onvrywillige bekendmaking van ʼn MIVstatus.