Читать книгу A Companion to Medical Anthropology онлайн
98 страница из 242
Finally, the research on health syndemics (Mendenhall 2012; Singer 2011) has become an important locus for collaboration among biological and bio-culturally oriented medical anthropologists, and an area where deeper biocultural/biosocial integration has emerged. Singer and Clair (2003) introduced the notion of “syndemics” as the synergistic interactions of two or more diseases often clustering within populations suffering from multiple axes of inequalities in biosocial contexts. Syndemics has been adopted as a framing concept to address clusters of disease and social problems such as substance abuse, violence, and HIV/AIDS that cluster in inner-city, impoverished women (SAVA Syndemic–Singer 2009) and depression, diabetes, and social distress among Latina immigrants in Chicago (VIDDA Syndemic–Mendenhall 2012). Syndemics research is grounded in an integrated biosocial approach that links structural forces to structural vulnerabilities to disease, and explores biological and social pathways of embodiment (Bulled et al. 2014; Singer and Bulled 2012/2013; Singer et al. 2017). This then requires a mixed-method approach integrating quantitative with qualitative data, and ethnographic as well as more structured and biomedical analyses. And it has obvious applied implications for how we create policy and provide care to those living with greatest inequalities and at greatest risk to illness and disease (Mendenhall et al. 2017).