Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture

"Kleinman, a psychiatrist, trained in anthropology, reports on his studies of health care in Taiwan. He describes his observations of clinical interviews between various medical practitioners-folk-healers, temple medicine men, and Chinese-style and Western-style physicians-and their patients. Throughout this fascinating and thought-provoking account, the author stresses the importance of adopting the proper cultural perspective, making one's interpretations within that framework, and relying on direct observation. Kleinman is adept at setting the cultural context and acute in identifying the important points. His use of the 'explanatory model' and 'clinical reality' in his interpretation and discussion clarifies what otherwise might be diffuse and confusing situations." --Library journal "An exploration of the controversial borderland between psychiatry, medicine and medical anthropology. Professor Kleinman, with his feet firmly based in all three camps, has succeeded in writing a scholarly book which will reward a careful reader .... The author urges an integration of social and cultural methods into the routine training of doctors, so as to enable a more humane and appropriate clinical practice .. . . it can only be hoped that the doors of the various departments, including departments of psychiatry, will be open and that this challenge will be responded to."--British journal of Psychiatry "His experiences are not the point of his story; they serve to illuminate. His personal picture of Taiwan's health care is embedded in a matrix of argument. His aim is to convince us that we must study the whole of a culture to understand its health care, that a system of health care includes every healer and belief, no matter how foreign to the dominant practice, that common features of health-care systems can be derived from comparing them, and that these common features are instructive about health care and about our own systems." --New England journal of Medicine