Biomedicine globalized and localized: western medical practices in an outpatient clinic of a Mexican hospital.

Following contemporary globalization, biomedicine and western style hospitals have penetrated most corners of the world. We must therefore ask, "How has the diffusion of biomedicine impacted biomedicine's core features of practice cross culturally? How do physicians in different countries make diagnoses, explain etiology and treat patients? To what degree does a physician's cultural understanding shape biomedicine?" Based on extensive fieldwork in a Mexican hospital (Physicians at work, patients in pain. Revised with new preface, Carolina Academic Press, Durham, 2001), this study analyzes the ways in which biomedicine becomes culturally reinterpreted as it moves from one cultural venue to another, and explores the theoretical and practical consequences of this reinterpretation. This analysis illuminates the relationship between biomedicine and the nature of social transformations and refines our understanding of globalization. From a practical perspective, the study is important because a nation's epidemiological profiles are based on statistics drawn from the diagnoses that physicians make. We must not assume that because the same medical nomenclature is used to make the diagnoses, these diagnoses are based on culturally neutral and uniform assessments.