Medical Athropology has a midterm assignment which involves writing a paper revolving around a sickness episode. This can involve me, or someone else. A sickness episode here means an experience with sickness an individual has, in this case trying to highlight not just the physical symptoms alone, but the process of disgnosis, treatment, and the concepts of sickness vs. disease. The differences between sickness, disease, and illness have been a main topic of the course so far. It focuses greatly on humanity and medicine, and how ethnomedicine should be a main part of the modern medical system across the world.
I have decided to write about the struggles my mother, grandmother, and I have dealt with during our lives with endometriosis. It is often seen reoccuring every generation in families, suggesting is has a strong genetic predisposition. This disease has been increasingly more common in the last decade, not because of increased prevalance, but due to better diagnosis methods and the strive to have better practitioner-patient relationships. Endometriosis is a disorder where the tissue lining the inside uterus (the endometrium) grows in different locations in the body where it should not be growing. The disease can be divided into four stages, stage one being minor prevalence with few or no lesions, up to stage four in which the tissue has spread all over the body (not limited to the abdominal cavity) and has resulted in a multitude of lesions, wounds, and scars in these locations. Endometriosis was first identified by modern science in the mid 1800's, but was first described around 4,000 years ago.
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