Class is over, but the blog lives on?

The semester is drawing to a close, but strangely, the class blog has gained new life. I’ve added a few new items in the last week, and there’s a new discussion unfolding in the comments on my post about female circumcision.

So here’s the question: how many of you would like to see the blog continue? News related to medical anthropology didn’t end with the semester, of course. If you’d like the blog to keep going, too, leave a comment to let me know.

Medicinal plants in the news

Traditional medicine — and medicinal plants in particular — have been in the news of late. Two weeks ago, for example, the New York Times reported that “Dragon’s blood” is good for you:

Researchers have discovered that a plant widely used in traditional Chinese medicine contains compounds that slow the growth of the germ that causes most peptic ulcers.

The chemists, led by Weimin Zhao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, isolated 22 compounds from the treelike plant, Dracaena cochinchinensis, which gives off a dark-red resinous substance called dragon’s blood. They found two that were effective against the ulcer bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, and eight others that worked as blood thinners.

Their report appears in the October issue of The Journal of Natural Products.

Earlier this year, NPR ran a series on “Sacred, threatened plants of the Himalayas.” The series includes a report on Tibetan medicinal plants, which are increasingly endangered by global climate change and by global demand for the plants.

As you read or listen to these stories, keep in mind some of the different perspectives we encountered from medical anthropology this semester. How can we understand the ecological relationships between plant biodiversity and ethnomedical knowledge? What factors at a global and local level influence the use, distribution, and ownership of medicinal plants? How do U.S. media outlets depict traditional healing practices and the medicinal plants, relative to Western biomedicine? What values underlie the standards of evidence used to evaluate the efficacy of traditional healing practices?

AAA redux: Female circumcision

Two weeks ago class was cancelled while I was in Washington, DC for the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The antropologi.info is running a series of posts summarizing a few of the hundreds of sessions that took place at the AAA. The latest post features a debate at AAA over female genital cutting:

Is female circumcision violence against women or a feminist act? Are critics of this practice guilty of cultural imperialism? Those questions were debated at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Washington - among others by African anthropologists who have undergone the procedure themselves.

I didn’t see the original session, so I don’t know all the details. But it has been getting lots of coverage, including a feature in two posts (1, 2) by New York Times blogger John Tierney. In the second post, Tierney reproduces a detailed response to a reader’s question from University of Chicago anthropologist Richard Shweder.

Several of you wrote about female circumcision in your research papers. What’s your take on the discussion in the blogosphere, based on your research in writing the paper? Would you change anything about your paper, based on the issues Shweder raises? How does the issue of female circumcision relate to the concepts of cultural relativism and ethnocentrism?

Documentary screening and discussion

By next Wednesday, most of you will have left town for the break; those of you left behind may be studying for finals. But if you’re here and need a study break, here’s something to consider. The narrative medicine group at the College of Medicine will hold a discussion of A Closer Walk, a documentary about the global AIDS epidemic, which aired on PBS last year. See more about the film and related resources on its website.

The discussion will take place at noon on Wednesday, December 12, in room CG-041/42 (the communicore building at the College of Medicine).

Debate over climate change and health

Today the Boston Globe reports on a debate between scientists over whether climate change is associated with the spread of infectious disease. The debate took place during a workshop on global climate change at the Institute of Medicine, the health-related branch of the National Academy of Sciences.

The skeptical voice, according to the Globe, was Donald S. Burke, Dean of the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. Burke argued that there remains a lot we don’t know about the effects of climate change on health. He expressed caution about limits to existing data and argued that we can’t yet establish a causal relationship between climate change and increasing rates of infectious diseases like dengue fever, influenza, and West Nile virus.

Paul R. Epstein, from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard, disagreed. He argued that climate change was involved in changing disease ecologies related to the spread of infectious disease.

The Globe article points out that the scientific debate parallels debate between the Bush administration and several states, and that it relates to policy deliberations on Capitol Hill and around the world. What are some of the different ways that medical anthropologists might approach this debate?