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Going Abroad on Health Research? Then get some cultural sense.
Posted By Damjan DeNoble
I made all the classic mistakes that young researchers – especially idealistic and naive, still-in-college ones- make. I did not make contact with people before I went; I had no plan for what kind of research I was going to collect; I expected people to help me because I was ‘doing research’; I expected people to help me because I was coming from the United States; I packed for a resort not a research trip; and I expected to do three months of work in six weeks.
In the end, I basically ended up semi-illegally observing the ACHAP program, and allowing a local man and his family to become semi-dependent on my money. Of course, while all this was going on, I was having a lot of fun. And, that’s just the problem, its fun until you look back and realize how harmful some of the things you did were . Below you will find one of the letters I wrote home from Botswana, and below that is part of a guide that the University of Michigan School of Public Health is working on for both undergraduate and post-graduate students wishing to do healthcare research abroad. I am indebted to Annalies Heinrichs for sharing this guide with me and I sincerely hope that UoMSPH’s work helps students going abroad avoid some of the pitfalls I made.
You can keep reading by clicking the ‘continue reading’ button at the end of this article (ignore this message if you have landed on the page with the full article).
LETTER:
Hello friends,
——————————————————————————————–
Cultural Competency:
Again, Thank you to Annalies Heinrichs for this…
What is it?
Why is it important?
Background knowledge will ease your transition into the new community. Furthermore, sensitivity to regional customs and manners will help impart your sincere interest to the community members and will ensure that your project/research is appropriate, respectful, and applicable.
Real-Life Example and Suggested Reading
The Lee’s actions—their inconsistent administration of some of her anti-seizure medications, for example—were incomprehensible to Lia’s doctors. Conversely, the doctors’ seeming cultural insensitivity (burning the placenta, placing tubes in Lia when she was sick, keeping Lia from her family) and stringent adherence to Western biomedicine and Cartesian thinking was abrasive to the very core of their Hmong mindset and beliefs. Fadiman ultimately argues that this lack of cultural competency lead to Lia’s untimely and unwarranted death.
In Summary
This account of an immigrant family’s encounter with the American health care system may not have occurred in a “global” setting, but Fadiman’s account of a foreign family’s encounter with the American health care system delineates many of the obstacles to providing beneficial services (education, clinical care, pharmaceuticals, research) in the global arena. These obstacles may crop up anywhere that those supplying health services are unfamiliar with the cultural, linguistic, political, historical, and economic context in which they are working. In entering a foreign—read unfamiliar—setting it is essential that one enters as enlightened as possible with respect to the region’s sociocultural, historical, and political environment.
Places to start:
Potential Resources