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• Title: Conflicting Traditions, Concurrent Treatment: Medical Pluralism in Remote Aboriginal Australia (Author Abstract)
• Author : Oceania
• Release Date : January 01, 2007
• Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 240 KB

Description

Aboriginal people suffer from significantly higher rates of mortality and morbidity than do non-Aboriginal residents of Australia. For the past several years there has been a gap of slightly less than twenty years between the life expectancy of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory (Department of Health and Community Services 2004:24). Aboriginal deaths from respiratory diseases are six times higher than non-Aboriginal deaths; from diabetes, eight times higher; from renal failure, eleven times higher; from homicide, six times higher; and from child infection, fifteen times higher (Territory Health Services 1996:21). Aboriginal Territorians have both a burden of disease (Zhao et al. 2004) and a hospitalisation rate (Department of Health and Community Services 2004:31) that is 2.5 times higher than that of non-Aboriginal Territorians. As a result, over half of the Northern Territory health budget is spent on Aboriginal people, who make up approximately one third of the population (Department of Health and Community Services 2004:35). What these statistics do not reflect is that Aboriginal people consider themselves vulnerable to a wide variety of diseases, some of which are not considered to be the domain of biomedicine, such as illness caused by sorcery. In remote Aboriginal communities in Australia two healing traditions--Aboriginal and Western/biomedical--are often considered to exist. Researchers writing from the different perspectives of health care practitioners (Devanesen 1985; Gray 1979; Maher 1999), anthropologists (Mobbs 1991; Reid 1983), and political advocacy (Nathan and Leichleitner 1983; Saggers and Gray 1991) support this distinction. Despite the varying approaches employed by these authors to understand and propose methods of combating poor Aboriginal health, which range from encouraging greater rates of Aboriginal treatment at government clinics to arguing for independent Aboriginal health services, there is a general agreement that fundamental differences between Aboriginal and biomedical approaches to health exist. Each tradition is considered to have its own history, ethos, aetiology, and treatment options. In many instances both Aboriginal healing beliefs and biomedicine are essentialised and reified, with much of the variation within both of these approaches being forgotten. For instance, biomedicine at Harvard Medical School is different from biomedicine in a remote area clinic in Central Australia. Likewise, there is a wide range of Aboriginal ideas regarding health and well being across the continent, making it difficult if not impossible to accurately simplify this complexity.

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