SOP For Entry into Medical Anthropology Master's Degree. Looking for Critique.

[jdecandia]

I am looking for entry into a master's degree program within medical anthropology.

 

This is my draft that I am looking to use when I will be applying for the University of Pittsburgh program, however, I also hope to use this as a general draft for my application to other university programs. 

 

Would you please let me know if I have fulfilled the following requirements? I've already had a few friends look it over, but I'm looking for very nit-picky feedback. Please be harsh.

 

 

This statement is a vital part of the application, and carries the most weight in our admissions decisions. Your statement might appropriately address the following questions:

i. What are your primary interests within your chosen field of study?

ii. What theoretical issues do you intend to study in graduate school?

iii. On what region of the world will you focus, and what topics would you like to explore for that region?

 

 

 

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

 

For the majority of my undergraduate college career, I was focused on the medical tract, convinced that the only way to truly realize my dream of uplifting global welfare was to better my understanding of formalized treatment and effectively apply those teachings in my own future practice. It was only by chance that I later agreed to attend Miami University’s semester-long Tibetan study-abroad program offered by the anthropological department. Up until then, I had mostly regarded my anthropology minor as an interesting novelty and put little thought into taking a trip dedicated to its study. However, I was assured that, with both the Tibetan Medicine class offered and the opportunity of an additional self-guided research project, the trip would be relevant to my pre-medical education. Therefore, come September, I found myself braving the turbulence of Atlantic Ocean wind currents as my plane made its way towards the Indian Himalayas.

 

Through my internship at Kunphen Center for Substance Dependence HIV/AIDS & HRD, a self-guided community needs assessment on the health status of Tibetan women in exile, and my time spent in the Tibetan Medicine course I found that the ways in which Tibetans defined health and disease were so different from the ones that I had grown up with. I had to face my own biases. A term paper at the conclusion of my Medicine course required me to write on the strengths and weaknesses of Tibetan medicine. Yet instead I found myself asking what the assets and drawbacks of American medicine were. The biomedical understanding of health, dominant in modern Western medicine, rests on the reductionist understanding that a state of health is defined as the absence of illness. Under such a definition, an individual can be quantified by degrees towards or away from well-being in terms of bodily processes. I did not find such a definition dominant in the Tibetan system of health-care which emphasized a state of health as a comprehensive state of physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease.

 

These experiences highlighted for me how medicine is not just about proper diagnosis and drug administration. Medicine is a part of a cultural construct; it is an ongoing dialogue between health professionals and patients on definitions of health and disease. The Western ideological approach taken by Kunphen made little sense to the Tibetan people it was trying to serve. They found the strict regimen of pills and constant physical check-ups less engaging than the local doctor’s prescription which included one-on-one counseling often involving inquiries and advice as to how beneficial social interaction and stress-reducing therapies could play a role in their recovery. While I found my work with the patients there to be frustratingly halting due to their resistance to follow the clinic’s regimen, my understanding of the role that culture plays in treatment drastically changed. I came to see how differing ideological intricacies of health-care differed the extent to which patients perceived treatment as having cultural relevance to them and their willingness to use it. Specifically, I came to understand how the way in which the patient views the health-care provider had a greater bearing on patient compliance and outcome than simple prescription of treatment.

 

Because of the study-abroad program, I switched my focus to anthropology as a major with a neuroscience minor. I found myself absolutely caught up by the question as to how better to serve the health of larger populations. After deliberation with a Miami mechanical engineering graduate also interested in the same questions, we founded the Ohio-based non-profit “Aapki Seva”. Translated from Hindi, our development organization, “Your Service”, began with the purpose of connecting the needs of the rural poor in India with appropriate sustainable technologies. While founded in January 2013, we began our work much earlier when we sent our correspondent who was fluent in the local Telegu language for a three month tour of local communities within the Prakasam District of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Our focus in taking such an assessment was on understanding the perceived needs of the people we were trying to serve, without our imposition. The results were illuminating. Whereas we had initially perceived the greatest problem to be related to lack of proper infrastructure for viable farming practices, the locals identified issues of sanitation as utmost important. Time and time again the locals pleaded that poor sanitary conditions engendered poor health which prevented any sort of agricultural work. Even if improved farming equipment and infrastructure were provided, such tools would go wasted if no one had the health to use them. This was not the sentiment echoed by the community leaders who agreed with our initial diagnosis. After further assessment, however, our correspondent found that such leaders often had the ability to live in sanitary facilities that did not engender such problems. This situation brought forth for me again how definitions of a health community differed amongst the levels within that community.

 

Today Aapki Seva is continuing its efforts by contacting local NGOs based within Andhra Pradesh, and consolidating our resources within our Ohio-based team in order to provide low-cost, and culturally conscious latrine designs to our identified communities. Without our initial culturally conscious community-needs survey, we might instead be inappropriately working on engineering low-cost farm tools. Aapki Seva has been nothing but a continual learning process for me in that I have a better understanding how systems of health are a complex interplay between culturally constructed definitions of etiology and treatment, as well as the material goods necessitated by such explanations.

 

I believe that the ever-fluid complexities and contentious nature inherent in defining human health and disease can only be answered by a field such as anthropology. Anthropology differs from other sociological fields in that it favors a qualitative approach through interviews and participatory observation. I specifically find medical anthropology to be at an interesting cross roads in that it analyses a clinical science with ethnographic evaluation. Through such evaluation, a culturally sensitive and meaningful understanding of health and illness as it is defined within different social contexts can be ascertained and critically applied. As I found within my work in Aapki Seva, health disparities were prevalent amongst different societal groups due to varying cultural bases of such problems. My studies in India illuminated for me how definitions of illness are closely associated with dominant cultural ideologies and that, regardless of the organic basis of a disease, the societal interpretation of illness has a profound implication for an individual’s sense of well-being and perceived ownership of either physical, mental, or emotional pathology.

 

After having examined the literature of South-Asian traditional medicinal practices, I found that, although there is an increasing popularity of traditional medicine as the practice becomes globalized and commoditized, little is understood about the ways in which ayurvedic symptomatologies and interventions are constructed and legitimized amongst the populations from which it originated and the populations with which it is increasingly coming in contact.  Because of this, I would like to research how the embodiment of health is constructed within doctor-patient interactions amongst South-Asian ayurvedic practitioners.  Specifically I would like to understand how individual health is defined by South-Asian clinicians in relation to the basic ontological assumptions of remedial health care and how such definitions can clinically impact treatment outcome.

 

I see University of Pittburgh as an ideal place to explore such topics due to the multidisciplinary nature of the work, as well as the small size, mentorship, professionalization opportunities, and the faculty’s professional commitment to their fields.  Primarily, I see Joseph S. Alter’s research on the implications of health in relation to religion, nationalism, and ethnicity within India as being highly related to my area of interest. Laura C. Brown’s work examining language and commerce within South Asia could additionally assist me in studying the material nature of health systems. I hope to work not only within the Department of Anthropology but also with faculty at the Asian Studies Center, especially Fred W. Clothey whose work in identity-formation, symbols, and the role of religion within South Asia could illuminate the intertexuality of religion and medicine within India.

 

With the training that University of Pittsburgh can offer me, I would intend to secure position within the private or public sector as an active public health advisor of global health. I wish not only to serve the communities I would be working, but also the greater field of anthropology by generating high-impact, multidisciplinary research that serves in both an academic and applied fashion to impact global systems of health.