Sociocultural Influences on Health

Catalog description

This course is intended for students interested in U.S/Global Healthcare. It includes lectures, discussions, readings, and written assignments focused on various social, cultural, and economic factors that impact the health and illness perceptions and behaviors of various ethnic and minority groups. In particular, it focuses on how culture affects health and disease, and how health and disease affect culture. This course takes a critical approach to knowledge development by scrutinizing values, theories, assumptions, and practices cross culturally. It relies upon a range of interdisciplinary approaches to analyze how disease is diagnosed, treated, and experienced differently in various cultural contexts. At the same time, students will have the opportunity to examine and critique cultural assumptions and theories, the shifting nature of cultures, the situational use of cultural traditions, and the ethnocentrism of contemporary Western health care. Special attention is given to the influence of race, class, gender, religious, and spiritual ideas about health and illness.