Medical Practice And Culture Essay

In medical practice, it is often emphasized that physicians must practice cultural competence in an attempt to achieve better diagnosis, intervention and treatment via approaching the patient in a holistic manner. Regrettably, the definition of cultural competence and let alone culture is often mistakenly interpreted, nor is it unified. Borrowing from Greon’s ideas, Wilson argues that “differing understandings of cultural competence present challenges in terms of accurately and reliably capturing its meaning, making its measurement problematic” (Greon as cited in Wilson, 208, p.14). This essay will tease out the subtleties in efforts to elucidate any misunderstandings around term ‘culture’ from an anthropological perspective, whilst exploring its relevance to medical practice.

To begin with, culture can be defined as an anthropological unit that groups together individuals with shared

This can range from a microscopic level of a department at a hospital or between countries. In this particular paper, medicine refers to European practices, however, other countries may have different ways of approaching medicine, as Gaines and Davis-Floyd suggest, “biology is relative, not constant and universal in its normal or pathological states as Biomedicine asserts” (Gaines & Davis-Floyd, 2004, p100), indicating that depending on the culture that the medical facility is established in, there are different sets of ideologies that will affect the way in which the institutions will operate at what type of guidelines they will