Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн

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Applied medical anthropology has been strongly impacted by external theoretical and methodological pressures, as well as discipline specific values, theories, and dialogs from the biomedical sciences, as well as from the other social sciences. That impact has clearly moved and modified anthropological theory in innovative directions. There are numerous instances where other disciplines, theoretical approaches, and values have been strongly influenced by medical anthropology. And the reverse is equally true, creating general improvement in the impact of applied medical anthropology over time.

This flexibility of paradigm is one of the reasons for the successful expansion of applied medical anthropology, including a consistent expansion of the amount of federal and foundation resources that are devoted to medicine and the health care industries in the United States, and the success that medical anthropologists have had in competing for those resources through consistent changes in the biomedical paradigm as well as expertise in culture theory and qualitative (exploratory, formative, comparative) methods.