People who encounter the term medical anthropology, or, as explained in the preface, “health anthropology,” for the first time often are puzzled by what it means. Is it the study of how medicine is practiced, what doctors, nurses, or traditional healers from other health-care systems actually do? Or is it the study of what it means and feels like to be sick? Perhaps it is the study of folk illnesses in different societies? Might it be the application of cultural knowledge to the actual treatment of diseases? All these questions, in fact, can be answered in the affirmative. Health anthropology addresses each of these issues—and far more. A starting premise of health anthropology is that health-related issues, including disease and treatment, how and why one gets sick, and the nature of recovery, are far more than narrow biological phenomena. These processes are all heavily influenced by environmental, political-economic, social-structural, and sociocultural factors as well. Consequently, health anthropology has developed a bio-sociocultural approach in its effort to address health as an aspect of the human condition. To take one example, health anthropologists ask questions such as the following: Could we really understand the AIDS pandemic and respond to it effectively simply by studying the human immunodeficiency virus, its impact on cells of the body, and medical interventions designed to stop the virus from destroying the immune system? Would we not also need to know how to reach and effectively engage those who are at greatest risk for infection, to figure out the structural and situational factors that contribute to their involvement in risky behaviors, to know how much they know and what they feel about AIDS and how these factors influence their behaviors, and to determine whether the ways we go about interacting with them in the community and in the clinic draw them closer or push them away from our treatment programs? In other words, beyond biology clearly there are critically important areas of knowledge in the ongoing fight against the now about forty-year-old AIDS epidemic. Now, if we think about the AIDS epidemic as a global problem, a global pandemic, with different routes of infection, different populations at risk, different beliefs and behaviors associated with HIV/AIDS in diverse settings, and different health-care systems in different parts of the world or even different parts of a single country, we begin to get an initial sense of why a social science like anthropology might—as it certainly has—have a significant role to play in addressing the AIDS epidemic. This is of no small importance; we know from available research that HIV/ AIDS is destined to take a greater toll on our species, proportionately and in terms of absolute numbers, than the bubonic plague, smallpox, and tuberculosis combined. Consider the epidemic in South Africa, the country with the highest burden of HIV/AIDS in the world. As Didier Fassin (2007a:261) points out, “In one decade, the rate of HIV infection went from less than 1 percent to over 25 percent of the adult population and AIDS became the main cause of death for men and women between 15 and 49 years of age,” with an expected drop in average life expectancy in the country of as much as twenty years. Moreover, the global pandemic has helped to shape the social, cultural, and health worlds of people all over the planet, whether or not they are always aware of it. Within the broader story of the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS, however, there are many differing local narratives that together comprise the complex mosaic of the pandemic. The work of health anthropologists has been part of that story in many places and the same is true for a vast array of other health issues. Moreover, health anthropology, while sometimes contributing to cultural explanations of HIV/AIDS risk behavior, has struggled in recent years to counter explanations that fail to address the fact that the global economy or capitalism and social inequality are the primary driving forces in the epidemic (Hlabangane 2014).

Source: https://rowman.com/webdocs/Singer%20Ch1.pdf