Role Playing Examination

    In this role-playing scenario, you are adopting the role of a consulting medical anthropologist, being brought in by the SJSU Student Wellness Center. They have a health promotion effort that struggles with reaching the multicultural student body, as evidenced by the demographic profile of the university. They want to shift their emphasis from cure to prevention, especially COVID-19 testing and prevention. They especially want to connect to first-generation students, who are first in their families to college, and their families are often ethnically and linguistically diverse. The health center wants you to make recommendations to help their staff develop a training that will help the staff avoid cultural mistakes with the students, in their therapeutic interactions. They mostly want to develop culturally appropriate prevention workshops that would reach students and their families. They are sensitive to the consequences of biomedical-ethnomedical disconnections made famous in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and want to avoid condescension and create sustainable lines of communication. They staff at the Health Center knows you cannot create content that embrace every culture. Select a specific culture that attends SJSU. Do some library and online research on their medical beliefs. Then write a letter to the Wellness Center addressing:   How can you use the advice of Arthur Kleinman (referenced in Fadiman) to reach out to the culture you have selected, such as Hmong, Chinese or specific Latinx student communities, and their families? What are the possible barriers to preventative programs, such as COVID-19 masking and vaccination? What information would you pass along to the trainers to integrate into their lessons? What kinds of practitioners are respected in the culture you have selected, either from personalistic, or naturalistic traditions, that could be enlisted to create an atmosphere of medical plurality and trust?