Unhealthy health policy : a critical anthropological examination /

Collectively, these 23 essays on health policy comprise an exercise in critical medical anthropology, an applied subdiscipline of medical anthropology in which biomedicine is viewed in the context of larger social, political, and economic forces that affect human health at the institutional, national, and international levels. The collection is an important addition to several relatively recent and highly critical assessments of contemporary development efforts, notably Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development (CH, Jun'95, 32-5764); Emma Crewe and Elizabeth Harrison's Whose Development? An Ethnography of Aid (1999); and most specifically critical of the health sector, Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power (CH, Feb'04, 41-3505). The present compendium is very much in the spirit of (and provides support for) these earlier appraisals, charging that some development efforts merely reproduce the previously existing social inequalities they are intended to correct. A consistent theme is the degree to which biomedicine is now driven by neoliberal health policies that encourage market-based reforms, including increased privatization. Under this agenda, health care has become just "another commodity" that "only a few can afford." This is a potent and consciousness-raising assessment of the consequences of the escalating impact of financial, ideological, and geopolitical considerations on public health. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty/professionals. M. A. Gwynne SUNY at Stony Brook