erectile dysfunction drugs, cross-culturally

I’ve been silent on Culture Matters for way too long: first I was on a research trip to Egypt, and then I was recovering from a bug caught during said research trip to Egypt (Flagyl is my friend!). And speaking of pharmaceutical products, ever since coming back I’ve had a stack of drug boxes on the desk in my office that has elicited a lot of curiosity from visitors:

These are all the local brands of sildenafil that I found in a single pharmacy. There’s the Pfizer-licensed Viagra, but we also have Virecta, Erec, Kemagra, Vigorama, Vigoran, Phragra, and Vigorex. The Kemagra box features a tiger: Rrawr!

Self censorship of US public health search engine

Recently, BoingBoing posted about change to a government-funded public health search engine, Popline, so that queries including the search term “abortion” turn up no results. According to the article, the owners of the engine Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, have made the modification because they believed it was a condition of their federal funding.

Lisa Wynn, our resident expert on reproductive technologies, is not able to post about it herself as she’s off doing research in Egypt, but she did send me these comments on the story:

1) what’s interesting to note is the self-censorship. We’ve all known for years that the US administration under Bush has had a chilling effect on research and provision of reproductive health services internationally (the so-called “global gag rule”), but the idea that people in a university would voluntarily self-censor their database based on the interventions at an unofficial and extra-legal level from individuals at a federal funding agency is bizarre and troubling;

2) and secondly, on a whole different level, the restriction would have excluded a large body of medical literature that has nothing to do with “abortion” as it is popularly used, since the medical community uses the term “abortion” to also include miscarriages (”spontaneous abortion”) as well as intended abortions (”induced abortion”).

Johns Hopkins Public Health has a statement by their Dean, Michael Klag, on their website stating that the restriction of the search term was only intended as a temporary measure while certain articles deemed to be “abortion advocacy” were removed from the Popline database. Klag also states that the block on “abortion” was immediately removed once he learned of it. He also kindly includes details of the references removed from the database.

While this paints a slightly better picture of the affair, I’m concerned that materials regarded as advocacy should be excluded from searches. People interested in public health research might have perfectly legitimate reasons for wanting to read advocacy materials. What if some anti-abortion scholar is researching a paper on pro-abortion advocacy and is unable to find materials? It would also seem to imply that there is a clear line between advocacy and other scholarly writing on a topic. Isn’t it possible for writing to be both? And does this mean that all research and writing aimed at promoting social change of some form, or engaging in a debate, should also be excluded on the same grounds? And who is to be the judge of such questions, deciding what is advocacy and what is not? The over-reaction of the administrators to this issue would suggest that many making these decisions will err on the side of caution, and the self-censorship will continue.

Link to applied neuro-anthropology

Normally, I wouldn’t cross-post from the other anthropology site that I do, but my partner-in-blogging on Neuroanthropology, Daniel Lende, has been putting up some great posts that could just have easily been featured on Culture Matters because they’re about applying anthropology in all sorts of ways. I won’t reference them all, but I thought I’d flag a couple that might be of special interest to those involved with applied anthropology:

In Cellphones Save The World, Lende looks at an article in The New York Times on Jan Chipchase, a ‘human-behavior researcher’ and ‘user-anthropologist’ who works for Nokia. Daniel provides an extensive commentary on the original article in the NYT magazine, Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?; both would likely be of interest to Culture Matters readers. Lende follows up his original commentary with more information on Jan Chipchase here.

Another post explores an ongoing project, Digital Ethnography, at Kansas State University, with a couple of good video clips including A Vision of Students Today.

Finally, and I’m just sampling from a few of his April posts, there’s a series on obesity that looks at the ‘obesity epidemic’ from a holistic, anthropological perspective. There’s several posts, but the last (which have links to the earlier ones) are On the Causes of Obesity: Common Sense or Interacting Systems and Human Biology and Models for Obesity.

Like I said, normally, I wouldn’t shamelessly cross-plug posts on the two blogs, but since I’m not the one doing the postings, and I really do think that they’re great examples of applying anthropology to pressing practical issues like poverty or public health, I’m breaking my usual rule for self-restraint.

Do anthropologists have an advantage?

Here is a first post by PhD student Anne Monchamp. We are hoping that she will be heartened by this experience and will join us as a full-blown contributor.  JM.

Anthropologists do a lot of socializing.  I don’t just mean going for coffee or two hour lunches at the staff club, although that seems fairly prevalent at least in my case, I’m referring to fieldwork, a snazzy term for socializing; hanging out with people, telling stories, exchanging jokes, asking questions, etc.  This is the reason an article published this month in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, ‘Mental Exercising Through Simple Socializing,’ by Ybarra et al (200 caught my eye.  The researchers suggest that socializing has benefits beyond ‘wellbeing’ including improved cognitive performance and memory retention.  Just to give you a snippet from their results section;

Study 1 showed that specific indicators of social interaction predicted cognitive performance among cognitively healthy participants and that this effect extends across a wide age spectrum, including the youngest participants. This study extended previous research with elderly and cognitively impaired populations. Study 2 followed up on these results by focusing on younger adults and the possibility that small amounts of social interaction can have causal effects on boosting cognitive performance. Compared to control participants, participants who interacted socially for 10 min showed better cognitive performance, performance equivalent to that displayed by participants engaged in so-called intellectual activities. The findings showing that younger adults can reap cognitive benefits from socializing expands our conceptions of the social interaction–cognition link. Not only do the results show that the effect is causal but that the process is very sensitive to small amounts of social interaction.

For the whole article see http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/2/248.pdf

While the research suggests socializing can have positive benefits not related to thesis/work avoidance it also points to the decline of social connectedness over the last few decades in the ‘west’ particularly the United States (e.g. see Putnam 2000 Bowling Alone).  The researchers suggest that a lack of socializing has effects on mental and physical health as well as being a factor in cognitive decline.  The article concludes by saying that social interaction not only ‘boosts’ cognitive performance but that socializing it necessary at every level of human thinking;

it may not be inappropriate to rephrase Descartes’ philosophical statement [I think therefore I am] as “I think about and with others, therefore I am.”

So even if anthropologists don’t really get a cognitive advantage from all our socializing at least other disciplines are recognising the importance of socializing in people’s lives, which I am sure anthropologists have been claiming all along.

Anne Monchamp

“Medical Adoptions”

The school year started today at Macquarie and I’m trying to juggle obsessively revising the reading list for the Honours Seminar I’m running this semester and obsessively revising the budget of my ARC application, so I really do have better things to do than write little ditties for this blog, because Obsessive Revising really ranks very high on my list of Important Things To Do. But I simply can’t resist with this one.

Let me back up to tell you that a couple of weeks ago, my brother-in-law wrote me from Toronto to tell me that he’d met an anthropology graduate student who was doing his research on organ trafficking.

UnAustralian Vegetarian?

I have started going to Yoga classes at my local Yoga center. In a recent class I was standing in the tree pose and staring fixedly ahead for balance. It so happened that the object of my gaze was one word on a nutrition chart; “MEAT”. The word stood out because it had been written above (and almost on top) of the word “TOFU” in black permanent marker. The nutrition chart was entirely vegetarian but for the minor addition.

The nutrition chart was not large enough for anybody but the person standing in front of it to see, so people would have to actually walk up and read the chart with some purpose if they did not happen to be standing in front of it during the class due to the room being slightly over crowded.

Somebody clearly felt that this piece of information should be communicated, “MEAT” was needed. Was this person concerned that people attending this yoga center might be confused with a nutrition chart that did not position “MEAT” under the protein section? Or perhaps that the chart was UnAustralian? The Australia day advertisements tell us that if we don’t BBQ lamb chops on Australia day we are UnAustralian… maybe this is something that should be added to the citizenship test? Who was Don Bradman? Which country “discovered” Australia? Do you eat lamb chops on Australia day?

Centre for Indigenous Health

This is my first post in 2008; and I wish everybody an ‘ethical’ new year, and hope that we will stop making wars in far away places and will not inflict any more sufferings on others.

Sydney University has just announced that the Faculty of Medicine will establish a centre for indigenous health with the $10 million donation the university has received recently. I think this is great news:

 The Faculty of Medicine will establish a Centre for Indigenous Health following a $10million donation, the largest pledge by a living individual to the University of Sydney.

The immediate objective of the new Centre is to establish a number of outreach medical clinics in western New South Wales, which will directly provide health care to local Indigenous communities.

The Centre will also significantly increase the Faculty of Medicine’s commitment to the education and training of medical and public health students in the challenges of Indigenous health. It will provide similar opportunities for students in other health disciplines such as nursing, physiotherapy and speech pathology.

“This is a very exciting project for the Faculty and the University, and we are enormously grateful for this donation. It is wonderful to have the opportunity to work towards correcting problems and inequities that exist in Indigenous health, thanks to the generosity and farsightedness of an individual,” said Professor Bruce Robinson, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine.

The first outreach clinics will be held in Dubbo, Bourke, Brewarrina and Broken Hill.

“These locations were chosen because we already have established links with the communities,” said Professor Robinson. “Our plan is to start on a relatively small basis, learn from our experiences and proceed to expand the program provided that we have adequate funding.”

“The Faculty has for many years had a strong commitment to Indigenous health education but the establishment of this new Centre allows us to expand our programs.”

“One of our key aims is that, with a greater exposure to Indigenous health, more of our young medical, dental, nursing, physiotherapy and other health science students will be well equipped and inspired to work in this important area.

“http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=2130

International study, mental health, and migration in Australia

I’ve been very quiet of late as I’ve been on holidays after submitting my thesis in December.  I decided to give myself a break from all thinking for that period, which has been blissful.  I’m now back in the department and will start posting to CM again.  First off, an article in the Herald I noticed today which provides a commentary on the experience of many international students who come to Australia to feed its $11.3 billion “export industry”, the country’s fourth largest.  Although the view from the USA and elsewhere in “the West” might be that study in Australia provides a “beaches and beer” holiday, many poor students from Bangladesh, India and China are intent on gaining permanent residency.  The article’s author Tanveer Ahmed, a psychiatrist, writes about one of the less obvious dimensions of this “industry” the consequences the mental health of students who are often betting their family’s wealth on gaining PR:

Some universities have been the target of allegations that their degrees are little more than extended migration schemes, with the qualifications useful for only the points on the residency application but almost worthless in the employment marketplace.

But what is less commented upon is that overseas students are fast becoming one of the most vulnerable groups in our society. Working in mental health, I see more and more each month and their situations are often horrendous. Suicide attempts, self harm or drug overdoses are the most common way they present, usually in relation to financial and study pressures. It is complicated further by language and cultural difficulties and lack of adequate health insurance.

A 2004 study by the University of Queensland found their international students were three times more likely to suffer depression than local students through the course of their study.

Only this month a house fire in suburban Melbourne killed three Indian students. It emerged that they were sharing the one room in bunk beds and would sleep in shifts while the others were working part time jobs. Overcrowding and difficult living conditions may have contributed to the accident.

Overseas students are the new refugees, living on the edges of Australian society under the weight of visa difficulties, imminent deportation and reduced access to social services. They inhabit that ill defined landscape of unbelonging.

A psychiatrist’s perspective is welcome here.  I have also thought that the “international student experience” is something worthy of ethnographic study.  For an enormous “industry” the social dimension of international studentdom in Australia is poorly understood.  It’s perhaps not surprising that universities aren’t all that interested in knowing too much about this subject as it might raise uncomfortable questions about the largely financial, rather than academic, motivations which are driving ever increasing international student numbers.  In my opinion, it is also something of an open secret in the university “industry” that migration, rather than education, is the primary reason for many international students coming to Australia.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/no-spin-needed-on-desperation-for-residency/2008/01/24/1201157558750.html?page=fullpage

New blog: Neuroanthropology

I’ve been a little less active on Culture Matters of late. Not only did I have a really rough end of the semester (nothing like two new units from scratch to set you back), but I’ve also been working on getting a new blog project up and running, so I thought I’d let all Culture Matters readers in on it.

Since around 2002, I’ve become extremely interested in the neurosciences and the implications of new research in the brain sciences for socio-cultural theory in anthropology. This isn’t the space to go into it all, but new findings on neural and phenotypic plasticity allows us to think much more seriously about how culture might shape development, allowing us to think seriously about a kind of deep enculturation of the brain, senses, endocrine system, and the like. Researchers in fields that specialize in these topics are increasingly aware of the degree to which developmental variables affect developmental outcomes, creating opportunities for anthropological research to influence a host of other fields.

This might allow us to think more seriously about the organic dimensions of embodiment, as Tim Ingold has recommended. The relevance for applied anthropology are many: from medical anthropology to the study of trauma, from a reinvigoration of anthropological studies of childhood to the potential to engage in the public sphere with biological scientists who advocate reductionist approaches, a robust neuroanthropology might really enrich what we do.

So we’ve started a blog, Neuroanthropology, and you’re welcome to surf on over, check it out, and even join up as a contributor if this is your sort of thing (just contact me either through the blog or at greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au). I may cross-post a few things, but you should especially look for Daniel Lende’s discussions of stress, addiction, and medical anthropology’s links to neurosciences. It’s our Holiday present to the blogosphere.

Intervention Exodus

In a stark example of the social consequences of the NT Intervention, the bans on alcohol consumption appear to be producing migration out of the affected zone. The Herald reports today that numbers of Aborigines, including whole family groups, are moving into neighbouring states, such as South Australia, to avoid the new laws introduced during the Intervention. The long-term effects of this are unclear, but they do illustrate what happens when laws are targeted at particular populations in particular areas. Also, this kind of thing is a predictable outcome of prohibition strategies — the so-called ‘balloon’ or ‘hydra’ effect — as any student of our first year course ‘Drugs Across Cultures’ could tell you.

Drinking bans spark exodus from territory - National - smh.com.au