Amazon.com description: Product Description: The purpose of this book is to provide an introduction and overview to the critical perspective as it has evolved in medical anthropology over the last ten years. Standing as an opposition approach to conventional medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology has emphasized the importance of political and economy forces, including the exercise of power, in shaping health, disease, illness experience, and health care.

Since its emergence in the early 1980s, this perspective has struggled to move medical anthropology away from its service sector subordination to biomedicine toward a more holistic understanding of the causes of sickness, the classicist, racist, and sexist functions of biomedicine, the interrelationship of medical systems with political structures, the contested character of provider patient relations, and the localization of patient/suffer experience in political economic contexts.

The volume specifically builds on the extensive field research and health activism of three medical anthropologists who have played pivotal roles in the formation of critical medical anthropology, both as a perspective and as an organized body of scholarly work.

Of interest to a wide spectrum of health professionals, Critical Medical Anthropology, is designed for use as a supplemental text by instructors who wish to provide a sense of the range of perspectives within the field as a main text among instructors who have adopted the critical perspective and wish to show its relevance to a broad array of social science health issues.