Medical Anthropology

I am so glad to be writing this blog, because I must satisfy an inner desire to acknowledge my new found discovery. Inside of me an interest in medical anthropology is burgeoning and I am contemplating studying this for my doctorate in addition to epidemiology. An interdisciplinary approach to combating infectious and chronic disease is definately what I want to do.
Medical anthropology opens up a new avenue through which I can understand the human subjects afflicted by the diseases I wish to fight.

The ethnography "Will To Live" is the text which converted me to this field. I am still reeling from its explanatory power and its ability to illustrate what mere figures and statistics cannot.
The ethnography covers how Brazil became the first developing country to universalize ARV distribution to AIDS patients. It looks at how international political manoevering by Brazil allowed it to produce generic drugs and the local distribution of the drugs on the ground. It follows the lives of marginal AIDS patients, who are economically destitute and cannot afford to live a life conducive to adherence to the ARV regimen. That's where this house of care, Caasah came in by providing a place where people can find refuge from the violent distractions of street life and start anew building a "Will to Live".
The author Jao Biehl has such an intrepid way of writing as he exposes the inadequacies of the state health facilities in coping with homeless, marginilzed AIDS patients, including policies that understimated the HIV burden amongst the urban poor. He uses an epidemiological study of HIV reporting at the data reported to the Bahain HIV surveillance unit and draws astounding conclusion. He unravels the terms under which a patient is most likely to be engaged by the health facility, which appear to discriminate against men who have sex with men..
In addition, he shows that many patients from the street are admitted to the hospital only to die.

The most compelling question for me was how does an AIDS patient in Brazil balance their seropositive identity, which grants them access to a disability income from the government and material assistance from AIDS NGOs thereby giving them rights to certain good, what Biehl calls a patient citizenship with the fear of stigmatization? This played out in the prison where prisoners with HIV were separated from the other inmates and given special meals, but they were stimatized by the other prisoners.

I am still on my way to finding out what this Anthropology thing is. Biehl says "Anthropology produces different kinds of evidence", meaning different to what normally expect, especially in the sciences. The evidence from anthropology is by taking a local perspective into peoples lives and their dynamics, which I believe complement studies into the dynamics of disease within populations. Indeed, it is through the perceptive view of the ethnographer that we are able to understand how a person transforms their life to benefit from the ARV rollout and turn AIDS into a mere chronic condition, rather than a death sentence. Where else can one find that out?