Andhra Pradesh - Tirupati   

‘Be sensitive to patient’s culture’

Robin Oakley

TIRUPATI: Is knowledge of one’s cultural background essential to treat one’s ailments?

Yes, insists Robin Oakley, an expert on biomedicine and an associate professor of Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, Canada.

“The current trend in the West is adoption of qualitative approach of anthropology, which is essential to medical academics as well as practising medical professionals.” While ridiculing the medical practice of stripping an individual of his/her culture, mind and emotions, thus reducing the patient to a liver, an eye or an appendix, she feels the social identity of a person has to be looked into before taking up treatment. “There is a tribe in South Africa that does not accept brown-coloured tablets for no known reason,” laughs Dr. Oakley, who herself hails from the Miq-Maw tribe of Canada.

In an informal chat with The Hindu she opined that social and cultural determinants were often at the root of poor health, stressing that until doctors shifted their approach to be more sensitive to the patient’s culture, their pharma solutions would continue to fail and ‘waste precious financial resources’.

Dr. Robin Oakley is here in India on Shastri Indo-Canadian Faculty Fellowship Award, doing research at Sri Venkateswara University on the changing content and practice of science and medicine among Tamils.

The Siddha medicine popular among the Tamils has fascinated her during her stay in the midst of the Tamil-speaking people at South Africa. She is here to observe the same phenomenon among the residents of the villages on the Andhra Pradesh-Tamil Nadu border.

A specialist in Medical Anthropology, Dr. Oakley recommends the introduction of a Medical Sociology programme (which she calls ‘a cutting edge phenomenon’) in the Indian universities to bridge the gap between medicine and culture.

She however expresses concern over the abnormal inclination of the Indian students and policy makers towards emerging areas like Information Technology and Biotechnology as elsewhere.

Pooh-poohing allegations that the anthropology and allied humanities courses have no job openings, she insists that the graduates and research scholars are in great demand in voluntary organizations, policy making bodies and consultancies.

She calls anthropology a “humanistic science” which has to be encouraged at any cost, pointing out that the federal Government in Canada had started pumping in funds in this area to bring a qualitative approach to health.

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