Abstract
Medical Anthropology is one of the branches of social and cultural anthropology, and it explores the relationship between health-illness and their socio-cultural systems. In this reports, we wish to present in detail methods of qualitative study on psychosomatic research applying the approach of Medical Anthropology, illustrating our original reports such as <1> Socio-Cultural Background of the Clients in Folk Sector Medicine; Qualitative Research by Medical Anthropology Concept (Jpn J Psychosomatic Med 45: 53-62, 2005), <2> Illness Narrative in Psychosomatic Medicine: Qalitative Research in Cultural Anthropology (Jpn J Psychosomatic Med 45: 449-457, 2005), and <3> "Witness-Based Medicine" in Psychosomatic Medicine: Qualitative Research in Cultural Anthropology (2nd report) (Jpn J Psychosomatic Med 45: 907-914, 2005). In clinical medical anthropology, following 3 key concepts are much useful to clarify the socio-cultural interaction of illness experience. 1) Illness behavior in pluralistic health care system: Health care system of a society consists of medical subsystems that exist in cooperative or competitive relationship with one another. A. Kleinman (1980) described it as a local cultural system composed of three overlapping parts: the popular, folk, and professional sectors. It is meaningful to determine a patient's characteristic illness behavior within this pluralistic health care system. 2) Explanatory Model (EM): Doctors and patients view illness-health in very different ways. Doctors regard sickness as 'Disease' objectively in accordance with scientific rationality, while patients look at sickness as 'Illness' subjectively from their individual experiences of agony. In clinical sessions, these two different EM's conflict and assimilate. 3) Illness narrative & Clinical ethnography: Narrative approach aims to understand meanings of illness experiences and describes practical knowledge based on a patient's first-hand experience of illness by multi-vocal story telling. Ethnography approach tries to illustrate through clinical fieldworks the various worlds of patients' individual and local life story or history.
