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Biomedicine is an approach to medicine that incorporates core values that are communicated to patients, such as self-reliance, rugged individualism, independence, pragmatism, empiricism, atomism, militarism, profit-making, emotional minimalism, and a mechanistic concept of the body and its repair.

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Biomedicine is, in the U.S., more given to invasive forms of therapy that manifest a pattern of aggression that seems in keeping with the strong emphasis in American society on violence as a means of solving problems.

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Biomedicine is inextricable from the industrial capitalist context in which it arose which serves a certain class over others.

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Critical medical anthropology is the attempt to understand human health issues in their sociohistoric and political-economic contexts, as well as through sufferer experience and agency.

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Critical medical anthropology is a subdiscipline that asks whose social realities and interests (e.g., which social class, gender, or ethnic group) do particular cultural conceptions express, and under what set of historical conditions do they arise'.

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Disease is never in a social vacuum. Social factors, like poverty, racism, sexism, ostracism, and structural violence may be of far greater importance than the nature of pathogens or the bodily systems they infect.

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Health is access to and control over the basic material and nonmaterial resources that sustain and promote life at a high level of satisfaction.

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Health is an elastic concept that must be evaluated in a larger sociocultural context.

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Medical hegemony is the process by which capitalist assumptions, concepts, and values come to permeate medical diagnosis and treatment.

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Medical pluralism is the coexistence of an array of medical systems in modern state societies (e.g. Biomedicine and acupuncture).

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Medicalization is a process which entails the absorption of ever-widening social arenas and behaviors into the jurisdiction of biomedical treatment through a constant extension of pathological terminology to cover new conditions and behaviors.