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"Barnes, Linda L"
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The Impact of Functional Health Literacy and Acculturation on the Oral Health Status of Somali Refugees Living in Massachusetts
Objectives. We assessed the impact of health literacy and acculturation on oral health status of Somali refugees in Massachusetts. Methods. Between December 2009 and June 2011, we surveyed 439 adult Somalis who had lived in the United States 10 years or less. Assessments included oral examinations with decayed, missing, and filled teeth (DMFT) counts and measurement of spoken English and health literacy. We tested associations with generalized linear regression models. Results. Participants had means of 1.4 decayed, 2.8 missing, and 1.3 filled teeth. Among participants who had been in the United States 0 to 4 years, lower health literacy scores correlated with lower DMFT (rate ratio [RR] = 0.78; P = .016). Among participants who had been in the country 5 to 10 years, lower literacy scores correlated with higher DMFT (RR = 1.37; P = .012). Literacy was not significantly associated with decayed teeth. Lower literacy scores correlated marginally with lower risk of periodontal disease (odds ratio = 0.22; P = .047). Conclusions. Worsening oral health of Somali refugees over time may be linked to less access to preventive care and less utilization of beneficial oral hygiene practices.
Journal Article
Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts
When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people
might point to the \"rediscovery\" of Chinese acupuncture in the
1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts , Linda Barnes
leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the
story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese
understandings of illness and healing. As Westerners struggled to
understand new peoples unfamiliar to them, how did they make sense
of equally unfamiliar concepts and practices of healing? Barnes
traces this story through the mid-nineteenth century, in both
Europe and, eventually, the United States. She has unearthed
numerous examples of Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats,
and physicians in China, Europe, and America encountering and
interpreting both Chinese people and their healing practices, and
sometimes adopting their own versions of these practices. A medical
anthropologist with a degree in comparative religion, Barnes
illuminates the way constructions of medicine, religion, race, and
the body informed Westerners' understanding of the Chinese and
their healing traditions.
eBook
Self-Awareness and Cultural Identity as an Effort to Reduce Bias in Medicine
In response to persistently documented health disparities based on race and other demographic factors, medical schools have implemented “cultural competency” coursework. While many of these courses have focused on strategies for treating patients of different cultural backgrounds, very few have addressed the impact of the physician’s own cultural background and offered methods to overcome his or her own unconscious biases. In hopes of training physicians to contextualize the impact of their own cultural background on their ability to provide optimal patient care, the authors created a 14-session course on culture, self-reflection, and medicine. After completing the course, students reported an increased awareness of their blind spots and that providing equitable care and treatment would require lifelong reflection and attention to these biases. In this article, the authors describe the formation and implementation of a novel medical school course on self-awareness and cultural identity designed to reduce unconscious bias in medicine. Finally, we discuss our observations and lessons learned after more than 10 years of experience teaching the course.
Journal Article
American Acupuncture and Efficacy: Meanings and Their Points of Insertion
By its very definition, efficacy's meanings remain fluid, their particularities contingent on context. The change seen as significant may occur on a symbolic level or through the removal of physical symptoms. It may address conditions of a social body. Some discussions differentiate between \"healing\" and \"curing.\" Many of these meanings surface when examining what efficacy means in the practice of acupuncture in the United States. This complex phenomenon is possible largely because acupuncture draws on the qi paradigm on the one hand, allowing for the most ephemeral dimensions of experience to be included in considerations of efficacy. On the other hand, in the most material sense, acupuncture is also susceptible to being conceptualized as a device, independent of that same paradigm, allowing for the insertion of biomedical models and criteria. Pluralism within acupuncture itself intersects with, and even embodies, the medical pluralism of U.S. culture.
Journal Article
Needles, herbs, gods, and ghosts : China, healing, and the West to 1848
When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the \"rediscovery\" of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing. As Westerners struggled to understand new peoples unfamiliar to them, how did they make sense of equally unfamiliar concepts and practices of healing? Barnes traces this story through the mid-nineteenth century, in both Europe and, eventually, the United States. She has unearthed numerous examples of Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and physicians in China, Europe, and America encountering and interpreting both Chinese people and their healing practices, and sometimes adopting their own versions of these practices.
A medical anthropologist with a degree in comparative religion, Barnes illuminates the way constructions of medicine, religion, race, and the body informed Westerners' understanding of the Chinese and their healing traditions.
eBook
FROM MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AT A MEDICAL SCHOOL TO CAREERS IN COMMUNITY-BASED APPLIED ANTHROPOLOGY
This article discusses the origins and development of the MS Program in Medical Anthropology in the Division of Graduate Medical Sciences at Boston University School of Medicine. We review how our faculty identified the need for the program as well as how we developed its design and negotiated the degree curriculum and requirements. We trace the evolution of our Service-Learning Internship Program (SLIP) and its establishment at various facilities. Finally, we discuss how we translated anthropological research paradigms to clinical settings and how the degree experience has translated into careers in community-based anthropology.
Journal Article
APPLIED TRAINING IN A MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY MASTER’S PROGRAM
Learning practical skills is key to becoming an applied anthropologist. For my MS degree, I chose a program at Boston University School of Medicine that incorporates skills development into the curriculum through its Service-Learning Internship Program (SLIP). The SLIP facilitates students’ familiarity with their field site throughout the first year, before they start summer fieldwork. My SLIP and thesis fieldwork took place in a VA hospital’s pain clinic—a placement ideal for my interest in researching pain management during an opioid epidemic. This paper describes my training, developing a research question, meeting theoretical and logistical requirements, handling the unpredictable nature of research, data collection, analysis, and writing. I use getting Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for my thesis project as an example of how these skills came together. Guided by my mentors, this experience afforded me hands-on training. I can now bring my anthropological approach into the work force.
Journal Article
Looking Islam in the Teeth: The Social Life of a Somali Toothbrush
The Arabic miswak (Somali, adayge) is a tooth-cleaning stick from the Salvadora persica plant. In this article, we trace the social life of a \"thing,\" examining meanings inscribed in the stick brush, drawing on interviews with 82 Somali refugees in Massachusetts and an analysis of local and transnational science and marketing. The miswak toothbrush symbolizes relationships to nature, homeland culture, global Islam, globalizing dental medicine, and the divine as it intersects with the lives of producers, marketers, distributors, and users, creating hybrid cultural forms in new contexts.
Journal Article