Career opportunities

... are the ones that never knock.

Ideal academic vacancy came up, synthesising the two most enduring loves of my intellectual life, medicine and anthropology. Some may, like me, wonder WTF 'medical anthropology' comprises, and we have the answer here. All my favourite subjects.

Medical Anthropology is a subfield of anthropology that draws upon social, cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology to better understand those factors which influence health and well being (broadly defined), the experience and distribution of illness, the prevention and treatment of sickness, healing processes, the social relations of therapy management, and the cultural importance and utilization of pluralistic medical systems...

Medical anthropologists study such issues as:

Health ramifications of ecological "adaptation and maladaptation"
Popular health culture and domestic health care practices
Local interpretations of bodily processes
Changing body projects and valued bodily attributes
Perceptions of risk, vulnerability and responsibility for illness and health care
Risk and protective dimensions of human behavior, cultural norms and social institutions
Preventative health and harm reduction practices
The experience of illness and the social relations of sickness
The range of factors driving health, nutrition and health care transitions
Ethnomedicine, pluralistic healing modalities, and healing processes
The social organization of clinical interactions
The cultural and historical conditions shaping medical practices and policies
Medical practices in the context of modernity, colonial, and post-colonial social formations
The use and interpretation of pharmaceuticals and forms of biotechnology
The commercialization and commodification of health and medicine
Disease distribution and health disparity
Differential use and availability of government and private health care resources
The political economy of health care provision.
The political ecology of infectious and vector borne diseases, chronic diseases and states of malnutrition, and violence
The possibilities for a critically engaged yet clinically relevant application of anthropology

Due to the wrong PhD, there's little point in applying sadly, but what a course one could teach on this-

a) Global distribution of healthcare- indicators in life expectancy, infant mortality
b) Healthcare across history and societies
c) Influence of Big Pharma, economics of corporate healthcare
d) Physical anthropology of the evolution of the brain and language
e) Advantages and drawbacks of civilisation-
diseases of domestication and farming, malnutrition, social stratification
f) Biology and ecology of symbiosis, commensuralism and parasitism
g) Evolutionary/archaoelogical/ historical aspects of health
h) Role of the shaman in healthcare
i) Placebo effect
j) Medical high priests and evidence based medicine
k) Social ecology of human disease
l) Psychological and sociological determinants of mental and physical health
m) Locus of health- God, society, self, soul, genes, molecules.