Medical Anthropology The Future is Now

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Medical AnthropologyThe Future is Now

• Mark Nichter SFAA/SMA 2006

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Charge

• Careers for the future 8 examples of employment
  opportunities we need to pursue vigorously
• Building MASA becoming a proactive community of
  practice

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Careers

• Eight opportunities medical anthropologists need
  to pursue

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Teaching Beyond the academy

• Medical anthropology needs to become a core
  subject not just in medical and nursing schools,
  and schools of public health
• Schools of Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Schools training health techs, attendants, and
  auxiliary care providers
• Down to junior college level etc.

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Translational Research

• Anthropologists need to be involved in
  translating scientific information to the public
  and evaluating how the public understands vital
  information they are exposed to (example risk)
• Public sector
• Private sector
• News / media

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Tracking information flow

• Anthropologists need to invent jobs in the
  information dissemination and tracking field
• We need to engage distributed networks
• What sources of information are people accessing
  and how are they using it
• What information is deemed credible and to whom

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Monitoring and evaluation

• Anthropologists should know how to conduct
  outcome and process evaluations for employment
  and to be better critics
• Example of growth area
• Planned behavior change All behavior change
  interventions should have anthropologists
  monitoring why programs work and do not work in
  real time

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Consumer behavior

• Anthropologists need to forge new careers in the
  interface between consumer behavior, marketing
  practices, and health outcomes
• GIS methods will be crucial for community level
  assessment
• Monitoring of some behaviors may require hybrid
  training
• example over the counter self medication
  anthropologists with some knowledge of pharmacy

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Clinical Trials

• Anthropologists need to create jobs for
  themselves monitoring how clinical trials are
  actually being implemented
• Ethics need to be engaged proactively from
  informed consent procedures to participant
  expectations and behavior change during trials
• Informed consent needs to be seen as a process,
  not a one point in time signing of a legal
  document protecting those that conduct trials
  more than subjects
• This is in the best interests of those
  committing serious funds to high cost trials

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Occupational health

• Anthropologists need to create an niche for
  themselves in occupational health investigating
  such things as
• Working conditions physical and the
  psychosocial
• Work cultures behavioral patterns associated
  with work sites
• Effect of shift work,
• Food /drug consumption
• Sleep patterns

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Health and health care transition

• Anthropologists need to become more involved in
  the design and ongoing evaluation of health care
  programs for the aged
• This population is growing in size and political
  importance
• Different segments of this population will have
  different social as well as medical needs, and
  these needs are changing

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Can MASA

• Become a community
• of practice

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Reflection points

• Why should graduate students bother to interact
  why is this form of social capital important
• What tangible incentives are there for
  interacting
• Comrade and support are important, but not
  sufficient
• How about trading resources what resources

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MASA needs to reflect on past experience

• SMA web site and Hnet was set up to facilitate
  exchange asses what exchange occurred
• Experience
• many people are eating available resources on
  the website
• few people are contributing resources or cooking
  why
• what is it that could be shared that is non
  threatening and could get you symbolic capital
• MASA figure this out

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Big idea

• Create practice based networks
• Similar grad student research projects conducted
  in different places with a common method base
• Create big N study with lots of small N grad
  student projects (thesis and dissertations)
• Compare different populations across space and
  time
• Sell idea to funders like NSF

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Networks and rapid response

• Create network of students working in a common
  subject area
• Events occur and AAA/SMA needs rapid response to
  gain visibility
• Experts are asked student networks could provide
  spokespeople in SMA with their observations from
  around the country and the world

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You want in the game get in the game