Subject Specific Databases

The Three Databases and articles I found this week are:
1. From PsychInfo

 Assad, T., Okasha, T., Ramy, H., Goueli, T., El-Shinnawy, H., Nasr, M.,... Shorab, I. (2015). Role of traditional healers in the pathway to care of patients with bipolar disorder in Egypt. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 61(6), 583-590. http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2090/10.1177/0020764014565799 
  • PsychInfo is a psychology specific database. My research is focusing on types of ethnomedicine the approach to the treatment of mood disorders which are psychological disorders from the biomedical perspecitve. 
2. From Anthropological Literature

 Storck, M. (2000). Depressive illness and Navajo healing. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 14(4), 571-597. http://www.jstor.org/stable/649721
  • Anthropological Literature is an anthropology specific database. Ethnomedicine is a sub-discipline of medical anthropology. 


 3. From Pubmed/Medline

 Kelly, B. (2008). Buddhist psychology, psychotherapy and the brain: A critical introduction. Transcultural Psychiatry., 45(1), 5-30. http://ntserver1.wsulibs.wsu.edu:2782/doi/10.1177/1363461507087996
  • Pubmed/Medline is specific to the medical sciences. Ethnomedicine is culturally specific form of medicine. 


Write a brief reflection describing what you learned from searching for your topic in a variety of subject specific databases. Were you surprised by any of the perspectives from unfamiliar fields?

This week I found that it is more difficult than I thought to find information regarding ethnomedical practices that are not compared with, utilized alongside, or confounded by interpretations based on western biomedicine. I think that most scholarly inquiry into ethnomedicine is being conducted by western institutions (such as universities) and therefore the information being published is being interpreted in a variety of ways that relate to western biomedical paradigms. I think that for pure ethnographical accounts of information on traditional cultural medical practices in treatment of mental health disorders, the books I found might be more useful. I have been able to find many articles focused on Chinese medicine and mental health/mood disorders, but other types of ethnomedicine are more difficult to come by.

I was not very surprised by the perspectives that I found. The anthropology specific databases provided more emic perspectives, while searching via PsychInfo and Pubmed/Medline provided more etic perspectives. Since biomedicince and psychology/psychiatry are western medical constructs/systems, this is to be expected.

Comments

  1. AnonymousMarch 6, 2018 at 12:33 PM

    Great job on this assignment! Your citations look great and you make a great observation about the western perspective of these articles as it relates to your topic. Although it is important to vary your perspectives and view your research from all possible angles, when working with culturally specific material, it is important to view the research through that particular cultures lens. I am glad that you noticed this and found the anthropology database useful. We have access to two databases that might also be useful to your research. You can try searching in American Indian Experience, and American Indian Histories and Cultures for information on your topic to gain the cultural perspective that you are seeking.

    Great job on this assignment!

    Kimberly

    ReplyDelete

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