Cultural practices Essay

1. ) The article helped me gain a deeper understanding about how varied the effects of a drug can be to different patients. Whenever I see how hospital doctors with incoming patients ask what the details of their patient are, I used to think that mentioning the person’s ethnicity is not very important and I have always wondered why it was mentioned anyway. Now I believe that it is actually very important as the doctor administering specific drugs would have to cross reference them with the patient’s ethnicity in order to make sure that a drug that causes adverse effects for people of the patient’s ethnicity would not be administered and appropriate substitutes can be sought. 2. ) The article through the results that it presented gave me a different way of seeing the human body. Despite obvious outer differences such as skin color, height and build, and so on, I’ve always thought that the inner-workings of the human body are constant with everyone and that our reactions to medicines would be the same regardless of trivial differences. The article made me see that the differences that I once thought as trivial where medicine is concerned are not so trivial at all. There was thorough explanation of how cultural practices over long periods of time can alter respective physiological characteristics of people in such a way as to not only change external features but internal features as well, including reactions to different types of medicine. 3. ) Yes, the article has made me see that cultural and ethnic differences extend beyond superficialities and within the intricacies of humanc. It has changed my perspective in approaching problems concerning the applicability of medicines to humans such that I would now consider ethnicity and cultural practices as some of the factors that can significantly affect medical reactions. I believe that this has broadened my beliefs and made me better equipped in handling situations that I will face later on both in my education and in my career. Reference Does Ethnicity Influence Adverse Reactions to Drugs? Retrieved June 4, 2008 from: http://www. aafp. org/afp/20061015/tips/15. html