Lectures

October 14, 2020

Ethnomedicinal Practices and Behavioral Changes During Deadly Disease Outbreaks: A Commentary and Lesson from Cameroon

By Ivo Ngade

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

In mid-2014, six months after the death of patient zero, the two-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou in Guinea, there were frequent reports of Ebola spikes across Guinea and beyond other parts of West Africa. I had just defended my PhD and soon after was accepted for a postdoctoral fellowship at Rhodes University, South Africa for the following year. In …

Lectures

September 15, 2020

Needles to needles: how ear acupuncture can work for substance use recovery

By Eana Meng

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

Helen was telling me about her day while I poured tea. Suddenly, the double doors swung open and a middle-aged man in a worn grey jacket briskly walked in. He looked at us, pointed to the room behind us, and blurted out, “Ear acupuncture?”

“Yes,” Helen said. “Have you been here before?”

The man nodded and walked past us into …

Features

March 25, 2016

Emptiness and the Medical Encounter: The interior spatial requirements of encountering

By Suzanne Cochrane

This article is part of the series: Translating Vitalities

Thirty spokes converge in a hub
There where there is nothing,
That is the chariot’s usefulness.
Fashion earth to make a vase from it,
There where there is nothing,
That is the vessel’s usefulness

– Lao Zi

Emptiness…makes it possible to move about freely and succeeds in ‘letting pass’. The important thing is not to determine ‘what’ passes – assuming

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Books

February 1, 2013

Book review – Sienna Craig’s Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine

By Stephan Kloos

Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine

by Sienna R. Craig

University of California Press, 2012

344 pp., US$34.95 paperback

It is a truism that the world we live in today is increasingly interconnected. Yet, when it comes to medicine – and particularly “traditional” or alternative medicine – the tendency is often to delimit its study along …

Somatosphere

Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.

Tag Archives: Alternative medicine

Ethnomedicinal Practices and Behavioral Changes During Deadly Disease Outbreaks: A Commentary and Lesson from Cameroon

Needles to needles: how ear acupuncture can work for substance use recovery

Emptiness and the Medical Encounter: The interior spatial requirements of encountering

Book review – Sienna Craig’s Healing Elements: Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine