In this essay, I borrow the idea of universal precautions from infection control and suggest that family physicians use a set of considerations, based on the mnemonic UNIVERSAL, to nurture cultural humility, enter a metaphoric "space-in-between" in cross-cultural encounters, and foster global fluency. These UNIVERSAL considerations I base on my experiences in global family medicine, attending t...

Policies on economic use of natural resources require considerations to social and cultural values. In order to make those concrete in a planning context, this paper aims to interpret social and cultural criteria, identify indicators, match these with verifier variables and visualize them on maps. Indicators were selected from a review of scholarly work and natural resource policies, and then m...

In this article a special attention is paid to the to the role of public service broadcaster in cultural diversity societies. The main aims of the author was answering the following questions: how cultural pluralism is implemented by the public service broadcaster in Switzerland? How the Swiss PSB implements the principle of cultural pluralism, particularly in the context of the access of natio...

The aim of this paper is to expand upon the conclusions reached by Orr and Genesen in their 1997 article (published in this journal), Requests for 'inappropriate' treatment based on religious beliefs. Assuming, with Orr and Genesen, that claims made in the name of religion are not absolute, I will propose some principles for determining when claims based on religious beliefs or cultural sensibi...

BACKGROUND Possessing a strong cultural identity has been shown to protect against mental health symptoms and buffer distress prompted by discrimination. However, no research to date has explored the protective influences of cultural identity and cultural engagement on violent offending. This paper investigates the relationships between cultural identity/engagement and violent recidivism for a ...

Warren Weaver, a biological scientist, wrote that. “..... as man’s control of his environment has proceeded... he has progressively uncovered more and unifying principles which accept the ever increasing variety, but recognize and underlying unity. He has, in short, discovered the many and the one.... The diversity....a surface phenomenon. When one looks underneath and within, the universal uni...

Maintaining and enhancing standards of clinical care requires continuous effort and vigilance on the part of the care providers. This is partly because standards of care itself is always changing, being responsive to new therapeutic findings or new manifestation and characteristics of the disease or new understanding of its pathophysiology. We are accustomed to the need for adopting new antibio...

BACKGROUND There is little consensus on the extent to which psychiatric disorders or syndromes are universal or the extent to which they differ on their core definitions and constellation of symptoms as a result of cultural or contextual factors. This controversy continues due to the lack of biological markers, imprecise measurement and the lack of a gold standard for validating most psychiatri...

Behaviour settings such as work, family, church and community are primary settings in which we participate, they provide us with meaningful roles, relationships, and social identities. In fact, these are settings that provide us with a sense of community (SOC). SOC has been heralded as the guiding value for community research and action. It reflects the integration of people into networks and s...