Methods and Study Populations

Abstract

Anthropologists doing research in the field of medicine are still rather surprising for their research subjects. While psychologists have a clearly defined role within medicine, anthropologists remain, at least in Switzerland, undeterminable, even more so for the physicians than for the patients, as I may illustrate by a passage from my interview with the general practitioner Jonas Ender:

“On the one hand there are components like in any malignant progressive disease, but where you somehow never really know what is actually going on. (...). I have this patient with a Polycythaemia vera who...- are you a physician or a psychologist?

ck: Neither nor. An anthropologist, social scientist.

An anthropologist? — Well, I’ll have to stop speaking in technical terminology then. Okay, that is somehow a semi-malignant blood disease which can also develop over ten, fifteen years. Well, the blood produces too many red blood corpuscles.”

“People with HIV/AIDS are a vulnerable group that should be protected from researchers.”¹³