Eliciting Quality Patient Responses in Cross-Cultural Care

Posted by on Mar 23, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments The cultural worlds created by humans are not controlled by universal laws of science; each culture operates according to its own internal dynamic. Even members of a given culture acquire most of what they know in the process of growing up. Relating to other people isn’t learned the way, for example, disease theory is learned. So culture can’t be distilled into learned facts and doctors...
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Cultural Values of Latino Patients and Families

Posted by on Mar 15, 2011 in Latino Cultures | 4 comments Failure to understand and respond appropriately to the normative cultural values of patients can have a variety of adverse clinical consequences: reduced participation in  preventive screenings, delayed immunizations, inaccurate histories, use of harmful remedies, non-compliance, and decreased satisfaction with care to name a few. A primary challenge in working with patients from different...
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Faithful Infidel

Posted by on Mar 2, 2011 in Blog | 0 comments Why did I pick up a book by Ayaan Hirsi Ali? I had never even heard of her. In retrospect, I probably should have heard of her. Perusing the shelves of the Tattered Cover bookstore last week, the Ali book Nomad caught my attention. The very lovely black woman’s face gracing the paperback cover seemed to speak her book’s subtitle: From Islam to America. In my free time, I like nothing...
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Culturally-based Beliefs About Illness Causation

Posted by on Feb 21, 2011 in Cultural Health Beliefs + Behaviors | 0 comments Patients’ health beliefs can have a profound impact on clinical care. They can impede preventive efforts, delay or complicate medical care and result in the use of folk remedies that can be beneficial or toxic. Culturally-based attitudes about seeking treatment and trusting traditional medicines and folk remedies are rooted in core belief systems about illness causation, i.e., naturalistic,...
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