Practicing Medicine and Practicing Anthropology Can be Complementary: A Physician-Anthropologist in Academic Geriatric Practice

Abstract

First I was an urban anthropologist, then I was a medical anthropologist on the faculty of a university medical center. Then I went to medical school, completing undergraduate, graduate and fellowship training in internal medicine and geriatrics. At first I thought of myself as an anthropologist in medical school, a privileged participant-observer of the making of doctors in the United States. Ten years out of medical training I think of myself as a physician. I am responsible for the outpatient and inpatient care of elderly patients. I am also the medical director of a nursing home. I am teaching faculty for medical students and medical residents at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago where I give both lecture and bedside instruction in the finer points of geriatric differential diagnosis and medical management. Occasionally I volunteer for teaching duties in ethics and humanities. Yet my funded research is more recognizably applied anthropology. With funding from the Illinois Department of Public Health and from the United States Army Breast Cancer Research Fund, I direct a research and intervention project to increase use of early cancer detection among older immigrant women in Chicago. In this article I will describe the research, but my principal focus will be on the role of anthropology in my practice as an academic geriatrician.