Health or Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan

Health

Author: Jackie Ball

You're faced with hundreds of choices every day -- choices that will affect your health, safety, and well-being. By knowing the facts about everything from cigarettes and alcohol to food and environmental factors, you can make informed decisions. It's up to you to make the choices for your life. In HEALTH, Discovery Channel gives you information you can use to live a healthy lifestyle. You won't find advice here -- but with the information at your fingertips, you'll be able to advise yourself. And that's a healthy start.

School Library Journal

Gr 6-9-These slim, information-packed books approach their topics through myriad perspectives and formats: time lines, eyewitness accounts, "Amazing But True" facts, problem-solving queries, games, scrapbook pages, and more. Health looks at sports helmets and seat belts through time, alcohol consumption, nutrition, smoking, and more. Biology examines a smorgasbord of subjects including the heart, energy, the psychic challenges of climbing Mt. Everest, and the stages of sleep. In both titles, each of the spreads contains a research idea or experiment suggestion highlighted in a bright yellow box. Every page is illustrated with colorful photos, graphs, charts, maps, drawings, or cartoons. Font color and size change frequently. Students using the tables of contents as road maps will be able to glean lots of facts from these titles. However, many readers may find the organization and numerous tidbits of information and graphics confusing. These books will have browsing and reluctant-reader appeal and may work as supplements to textbook studies.-Barbara L. McMullin, Casita Center for Technology, Science & Math, Vista, CA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

New interesting textbook: The Healthy Guide to Unhealthy Living or Better Back

Illness and Culture in Contemporary Japan: An Anthropological View

Author: Emiko Ohnuki Tierney

Health care in contemporary Japan - a modern industrial state with high technology, but a distinctly non-Western cultural tradition - operates on several different levels. In this book Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney provides a detailed and historically informed account of the cultural practices and cultural meaning of health care in urban Japan. In contrast to most ethnomedical studies, this book pays careful attention to everyday hygienic practices and beliefs, as well as presenting a comprehensive picture of formalized medicine, health care aspects of Japanese religions, and biomedicine. These different systems compete with one another at some levels, but are complementary in providing health care to urban Japanese, who often use more than one system simultaneously. As an unequalled portrayal of health care in a modern industrial, but non-Western, setting, it will be of widespread interest to scholars and students of anthropology, medicine, and East Asian studies.

Table of Contents:

List of illustrations; Acknowledgments;

1. Introduction;

Part I. Basic Concepts and Attitudes Toward Health and Illness:
2. Japanese germs;
3. My very own illness: illness in a dualistic world view;
4. Physiomorphism (somatizion): an aspect of the Japanese illness etiology;

Part II. Medical Pluralism:
5. Kanpo: traditional Japanese medicine of Chinese origin;
6. Medical roles of Japenese religions: a descriptive overview;
7. Medical roles of Japanese religions: a historical-symbolic interpretation;
8. Doctors and outpatients: biomedicine (I);
9. Hospitalization: biomedicine (II);
10. Medical pluralism; Summary; References; Index.