Review Article
Year: 2022 | Month: July-September | Volume: 6 | Issue: 3 | Pages: 1-12
DOI: https://doi.org/10.52403/gijash.20220701
Facilitating Accountable Critical Thinking (FACT): A Perspective from a Novel Facet of Critical Medical Anthropology
R.Vinodh Rajkumar
Medical Anthropologist, Physiotherapist & Gerontologist, Director - Prabhanjeet Vitalityarium, Rajapalayam-626117, Tamilnadu.
ABSTRACT
A profession is not just a source to provide occupations to serve people by simply utilizing the knowledge as taught in the curriculum but to serve people with reproducible and verifiable facts. Professionals should be ready to abandon any indoctrinated knowledge if found worthless or harmful when applied. Not only that, the professionals should let the world know about the impracticality or harmfulness of any indoctrinated knowledge, and engage in critical thinking to generate better sustainable alternatives. In medical profession, rendering unbiased evidence-based support to the scientific facts is not possible without experimentations using similar methodologies. Though the greatest achievement of any medical invention (diagnosis, treatment procedure, prophylaxis, public health measure) is its generalizability, the tendency of the health care professionals to generalize a finding of someone or themselves without repeated applications in real-life situations has been an impediment. Critical thinking is the precursor for evidence-based practices in medical profession. It is highly difficult to shape the public health system into an evidence-based noble ‘School of Thought’ (preferably, nation-specific ‘School of Thought’) in order to eradicate iatrogenesis, pseudoscience, health inequities, statistical malpractices, quackery, professional degradation etc., for which important ‘Health Activism’ initiatives incorporating the principles of Salutogenesis, Homeostasis, Lifestyle medicine, Evidence-based practice, Transdisciplinarity and Teamwork, are needed. In fact, health care professionals should possess profound and flawless foundational knowledge about homeostasis. Anthropologists with any medical degree background could be competent enough to reveal various unexplored facets of critical medical anthropology to support standardization of the medical education and health care practices.
Keywords: Critical Medical Anthropology, Health Activism, Critical Thinking, Salutogenesis, Transdisciplinarity, Homeostasis, Evidence-based Practice, Lifestyle Medicine .
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