Last week, the PBS series Frontline aired its latest documentary, The Medicated Child. The program starts from the fact that some six million children in the United States are taking psychiatric drugs, yet we know very little about how these drugs work in children or how they affect developing brains.

It’s a remarkable—and often frightening—story that some aspiring medical anthropologist ought to write a dissertation about. Among the issues that deserve attention are the medicalization of normal childhood behavior, the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in child psychiatry, and the biological consequences of prescribing drugs that were not designed for kids.

You can watch the full program online. What other questions does it raise for you?

For starters, I’ve just posted an announcement about a local screening of the new documentary, The Business of Being Born. Judging by the trailer, the film touches on many issues we dealt with in class last semester.

Hope over to the sexuality blog for more details.

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.

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?

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?

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

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?

Here I am posting the form you should use in reviewing each other’s work. Most word processing software can open this file. If you have problems, please post a comment below.

For each paper you review, please add your comments in response to each question and send the final version to the author and to me as an email attachment by Nov. 20.

Peer response form

It turns out that people who are officially defined as overweight have a lower overall risk of mortality because they are less likely to die from diseases like Alzheimer’s, infections, and lung disease. At the same time, being overweight (but not obese) does not appear significantly to increase the risk of dying from cancer or heart disease.

In a New York Times story about this paper, several observers echoed some of our discussion in class:

Some who studied the relation between weight and health said the nation might want to reconsider what are ideal weights.

“If we use the criteria of mortality, then the term ‘overweight’ is a misnomer,” said Daniel McGee, professor of statistics at Florida State University.

“I believe the data,” said Dr. Elizabeth Barrett-Connor, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego. A body mass index of 25 to 30, the so-called overweight range, “may be optimal,” she said.

But as some of you suggested in class, mortality isn’t the only relevant outcome. Others argue that people who are overweight are more likely to develop heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions even if they are not more likely to die prematurely as a result.

On that note, another paper in today’s issue of JAMA examined self-reports of disability among people of varying weights at two points in time. They show that people defined as obese (BMI ? 30) are more likely to be disabled and that the disability gap between people in the obese and normal-weight categories has increased over time. But this finding appears to hold only for the obese category. People with BMIs in the range of 25-30—officially overweight—do not report higher levels of disability.

Causes of Death Are Linked to a Person’s Weight - New York Times

The talk focuses on the policy implications of global inequities in health. You will recognize the core arguments from our discussion of Infections and Inequalities, but the examples and evidence come largely from Farmer’s work since that book was published. (Those of you who attended Tracy Kidder’s talk two weeks ago will also recognize some of the photos.)

The best part, if you ask me, is the question and answer period — so hang in there through the end. What aspects of the talk do you find most compelling? In what ways does Farmer draw on his training in anthropology, not just in medicine?

Paul Farmer keynote address at the Heller School