medical care
Amish Family Flees to Protect their Daughter
As the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday approached last week, an Amish family decided to flee to Canada to prevent unwanted medical treatment for their daughter. Andy and Anna Hershberger and their 10 year old daughter Sarah Hershberger have been contending with medical authorities in Ohio’s Akron Children’s Hospital. The Hershbergers state that the chemotherapy drugs prescribed […]
Amish Responses to Health Insurance
The U.S. government shutdown because of Republican unhappiness with Obamacare prompts the question why the law exempts the Amish from the mandatory medical insurance provisions. According to a Reuters news story last week, the Amish don’t have to purchase the insurance because they insure themselves, within their own communities and in their own ways. An […]
Ju/’hoansi in the News
A series of news articles over the past month about the Ju/’hoansi of Namibia provide some interesting new information about the desert dwellers. Richard Lee, an anthropologist who has studied the Ju/’hoansi extensively, wrote an article picked up by the news aggregating serve allafrica.com about an initiative to foster the bio-cultural rights of the Ju/’hoansi […]
Difficulties of an Isolated Doctor
A lot of Internet services today are based on “the cloud,” but on the island of Tristan da Cunha, due to slow Internet connection speed, the practice of medicine is based partly on the gut—the intuition of the island’s doctor. Dr. Gerard Bulger, the physician on Tristan da Cunha, has published an article describing his […]
Severe Health Problems in a Piaroa Community
A news report last Friday indicated that living conditions in some remote, peaceful Piaroa villages visited by a medical team recently are deteriorating. A medical group from the University of Carabobo, in Valencia, Venezuela, visited a couple Piaroa communities in August and found that some of the people had tuberculosis and parasite infections. Others were […]
High-tech Medical Care for Tristan Islanders
The doctor for Tristan da Cunha, perhaps the most remote inhabited island in the world, has just been connected to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center through a high-speed, Internet service. The system that several agencies have established allows the island’s only doctor, Carel Van der Merwe, to record and transmit medical data—X-rays, EKGs, examinations—about […]
