With introduction of social niche effects into a model of cultural change, the frequency of a practice cannot predict the frequency of its underlying belief. The combination of a general model with empirical data from a specific case illustrates the importance of collaboration between modellers and field researchers, and identifies the type of quantitative data necessary for analysing case stud...

BACKGROUND Understanding the sociocultural dimension of a patient's health beliefs is critical to a successful clinical encounter. Malaysia with its multi-ethnic population of Malay, Chinese and Indian still uses many forms of traditional health care in spite of a remarkably modern rural health service. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is discuss traditional health care in the context of...

Pharmacists are caring for more individuals of diverse age, gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, sexual orientation, and health beliefs than in previous decades. Not all residents of the United States equally experience long life spans and good health. Health disparities in various cultures have been documented. One critical aspect of reducing health disparities is moving he...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Developing skills for taking care of patients from a wide variety of backgrounds is a growing area of importance in medical education. Incorporating cultural competency training into undergraduate medical education is an accreditation requirement. Although there are an increasing number of such curricula reported in the literature, there has been little evaluation of t...

Maternal placentophagy, the consumption of the placenta or "afterbirth" by the mother following parturition, is an ubiquitous behavior among eutherian mammals, including non-human primates. Here we report on a cross-cultural survey of 179 human societies regarding the consumption, treatment, and disposal of human placenta, in addition to accompanying cultural beliefs and perceptions about the o...

The increased prevalence of diabetes in Middle Eastern countries is a health policy priority. Important risk factors for diabetes have been identified. Lifestyle interventions and adherence to medications are central to disease prevention and management. This review focuses on the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus in Middle Eastern countries. The aim is to identify the ways in which knowle...

Children are at a higher risk for foodborne illness. The objective of this study was to explore food safety knowledge, beliefs and practices among Hispanic families with young children (≤10 years of age) living within a Midwestern state. A convergent mixed methods design collected qualitative and quantitative data in parallel. Food safety knowledge surveys were administered (n = 90) prior to ex...

Politeness, as a universal phenomenon in society, is a reflection of specific cultural values, which can be observed in all languages and cultures. This thesis attempts to make a comparative study of politeness behavior between English and Chinese on the contrastive analyses on such linguistic behaviors as addressing, greeting, complimenting. Owing to different beliefs and values, and different...

Using a theoretical cultural competency model, the effectiveness of a cultural competency learning assignment was examined to determine: 1) students' cultural competency levels as reflected through the assignment, and 2) the effectiveness of the assignment as a cultural competency learning activity. Third-year family medicine clerkship students completed a required project to research and refle...

BACKGROUND Emotional events are followed by recurrent talking about the event (Social Sharing of Emotion, SSE). Several factors that can account for variations in beliefs about SSE were examined: alexithymia, age and sex among two sample groups, Spanish (n = 388) and Uruguayan (n = 537). METHOD Both samples completed the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20) and the Beliefs about Social ...