In this course, I was able to build upon my foundational understanding of global health. Aside from expanding on global factors that determine health and wellness, this course particularly dived into the various social determinants of health and “up-stream” indicators of health, such as the social or political contexts a population is placed in that ends up impacting their health in a more visible, acute, and clinically diagnosable manner. We’ve also had many class discussions about the epidemiological paradox, which is a phenomenon seen in high-income countries where increased technological advancement has not fixed public health issues. Rather on the contrary, it was found that increased spending isn’t linked to better health outcomes, and in fact has contributed to the rising trend in non-communicable diseases. As a part of the curriculum, we aimed to look at the reason for this epidemiological paradox, and thus we have been studying the effects of various global health actors that heavily impact health determinants such as governments, our natural and information ecosystems, corporations, neo-liberal capitalist systems, multilateral institutions, and the medical industrial complex. We also touched on a lot more, such as the importance of community empowerment and advocacy groups in efforts to secure health as a human right, and various socio-cultural health determinants like inequity, racism, and immigration. Nevertheless, this class has given me a great opportunity to study the particularities that define the current global health context we are in, and I believe I am much more grounded in the reality of what kind of field I am getting ready to enter into.

In this course, I was able to dive deeply into the field of anthropology as it relates to medicine and health. This course was very transformative, as it strengthened my interest and appreciation for social-cultural theory, which anthropologists use to conduct research. We learned about this theory by immersing ourselves into various literature and media sources that helped introduce me to the methods and practices of medical anthropologists, particularly in their use of ethnographic case studies. These studies chose to analyze topics of interest in medical anthropology, such as women’s and reproductive health, which we studied by looking at interviews of U.S. women at various reproductive ages in the late 70’s, & mental health and addiction, which we studied by looking at interviews of U.S. homeless heroin users in the early 2000s. The course also focused on ethnomedicine, and thus supported the merit of alternative forms of medicine that are often not as readily accepted in western society, such as traditional chinese medicine and ayurveda. This course overall strengthened my cross-cultural understanding of health systems and the different interpretations of what health means to people of differing socio-cultural contexts. 

In this course, we studied the general overview of the U.S. healthcare system. The course dove into the history that shaped the current health context and the role of various actors within the system such as local and federal government, insurance, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare delivery structural services and their servicers. As we studied these particular players and contexts, the curriculum’s design was intentional in its efforts to relate them to our analysis of  the quality of U.S. health systems, the routes or roadblocks people have to accessing care, and the costs associated with the care. In order to understand and elaborate on these concepts, we looked at the intersection between politics and public policy, prior attempts to reform health care, and current public health programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. In the end, this course gave me a strong foundational background on the current state of the American health care, which is incredibly important to understand as an individual striving to work in the field of global and public health.