The indigenous drugs Butea, Embelia and Kamala have been used in India as anthelmintics from ancient times and they were even included in the British Pharmacopoeia for some time. Although the authors of books dealing with the indigenous drugs speak highly in general terms of these three anthelmintics, in only one instance do we find that any facts and figures have been given. Caius and Mhaskar ...

In the past two decades, Australia’s social policy approach to Indigenous people has been based on the overarching goal of striving for equality of outcomes, while also increasingly recognising difference. Such an approach is appropriate and allows for an amalgam of Indigenous citizenship rights, fully recognised since the late 1960s, and an expanding envelope of inherent rights, with the forme...

BACKGROUND The terms 'cultural safety' and 'cultural competence' are used widely in indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse health contexts. They form the basis for effective patient centred care and the professional advocacy role of the general practitioner. OBJECTIVE This article discusses the concepts of cultural safety and cultural competence. A checklist of cultural competen...

Teaching From Country (TFC) took as one of its primary tasks the following challenge: “What is a helpful conceptual framing of issues involved in our work that is valid in Yolŋu terms and supports translation into academic contexts?” This paper explores one dimension of this: how can Indigenous Ecological Knowledge (IEK) be “translated” so as to better prepare dominant culture environmental sci...

Technological advancement in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has made it become an invaluable component of a reliable environmental monitoring system; they form the ’digital skin’ through which to ’sense’ and collect the context of the surroundings and provides information on the process leading to complex events such as drought. However, these environmental properties are measured by various he...

BACKGROUND Indigenous Australians have high rates of diabetes and its complications. This study examines ethnic differences in the management of patients with type 2 diabetes in Australian primary care. METHODS Diabetes management and outcomes in Indigenous patients enrolled in the NEFRON study (n = 144) was systematically compared with that in non-Indigenous patients presenting consecutively...

Parenting may be influenced by ethnicity; marginalization; education; and poverty. A critical but unexamined question is how these factors may interact to compromise or support parenting practices in ethnic minority communities. This analysis examined associations between mothers' stimulating parenting practices and a range of child-level (age; sex; and cognitive and socio-emotional development...

The basic premise of this research was to assess the ethnomedicinal uses of plants in an ancestral forest area at Naawan, Misamis Oriental and determine its inhibition effect against bacterial strains. The assessment of plants was conducted using the transect-plot method. Ethnomedicinal uses and the mode of preparations were obtained using a semi-structured interview questionnaire. Five ethnome...

The use of indigenous health care workers (IHCWs), who were key elements in community health care programs in the United States in the 1960s, has gone in and out of fashion in subsequent years. The author and his colleagues recently established a service program at Wayne State University's Institute of Maternal and Child Health that employs IHCWs. Characterizations of IHCWs in previous health c...

The author argues that social and cultural anthropologists interested in medical systems should analyze the social processes involved in terms of development and capitalist penetration; the making social of disease; and their own views of anthropology. The effect of development on indigenous medical practice involves submersion of indigenous medical systems, commoditisation of medical material...