Craig R. Janes

The health transition, global modernity and the crisis of traditional medicine: the Tibetan case.

The epidemiologic and demographic consequences of the health transition, coupled with worldwide pressures for health care reform according to neoliberal tenets, will create new opportunities, and well as new problems, for organized systems of indigenous medicine. Spiraling costs of biomedically-based health care, coupled with an increasing global burden of chronic, degenerative diseases and mental disorder, will produce significant incentives for the expansion of indigenous alternatives. Yet this expansion will be accompanied by pressures to rationalize and modernize health care services according to the structurally dominant scientific paradigm. Without concerted effort to maintain native epistemologies, indigenous medical systems face an inevitable slide into narrow herbal traditions and a loss of those elements of diagnosis and therapy which may be the most valuable and effective. Analyzing the case of Tibetan medicine and other Asian medical systems, I show how this process occurs and how it is resisted. I conclude by discussing the policy dimensions of this problem.

Migration, changing gender roles and stress: the Samoan case.

The impact of migration and social change on male and female role expectations is examined in an urban Samoan community. Expanding role expectations and role conflicts in the urban context are linked to differential experiences of stress by gender, which are in turn examined with respect to the health outcomes of arterial pressure, a measure of physical health status, and a psychosomatic complaint index.