A Cultural Prescription for Medicocentrism

Abstract

Applied anthropologists in clinical settings are involved in a crusade for a pluralistic world view. Anthropologists, by training, have a belief structure opposed to ethnocentrism and its professional offspring, medicocentrism. Medicocentrism is a world view that filters experience through medical filters in which the medical view is reality (cf. Kleinman 1978; and Green et al. 1977). Anthropologists as culturally oriented people perceive clinical encounters as examples of world view conflicts: to the patient, uncertainty about the course of his or her problem is part of the illness; to the physician, organic pathology (disease) is most valuable. The physician searches for objectified symptoms of disease in a medical territory where environmental design reinforces disease as the central object. The patient experiences discomfort, ``my illness,'' and not a biomedical term, a disease (cf. Bryan 1979; Kleinman 1978). Thus, the anthropologist tries to understand the patient's perception of clinical reality, while the physician tries to fit patient experiences into objectified symptoms so that the transformation allows him/her to make appropriate clinical decisions in the biomedical realm.