nurse telling a Mexican patient she would bring her aputothe next day.Putoin
Spanish is a male prostitute, but in Tagalog it is the name for a rice cake.^64
As a final thought on language, a review of how English is used in discussing dis-
ease and healthcare issues can reveal cultural differences. Stop for a moment and
think about the terms commonly used when talking about some malady in the United
States—“fight off a cold,”“heart attack,”“cancer survivor,”“[disease] warning signs,”
and so on.^65 These terms, along with many others, illustrate how disease is seen as an
enemy attacking the body, an entity that must be conquered in order to ensure good
health. But recall our earlier comments that some cultures see health as being
achieved by keeping different ele-
ments in a state of harmony. For
them, disease and sickness are the
result not of an attack but of various
elements being out of balance. Thus,
telling a Chinese immigrant that tak-
ing an antibiotic will help“fight off
the infection”may not be as effective
as telling him the medicine will
restore the body’s balance.Death and Dying Across Cultures
If this were a book focused only on comparing cultural practices, it would be easy to
fill this section with examples of how people in different cultures manage death and
dying. For example, as we related in Chapter 1, the people of West Africa, where
Ebola ravaged the population in 2014, wash the body of the deceased before burial
and eschew cremation. In contrast, people in Nepal were unable to carry out crema-
tions quickly enough due to overwhelming numbers of deceased following the devas-
tating 2015 earthquake. Islamic law dictates that Muslims be interred as quickly as
possible after death, and cremation is forbidden. In the United States, burial may be
days or even weeks after death, and cremation is becoming more widely accepted. A
traditional practice in Tibet and some areas of western China, referred to as“sky
burial,”involves dismembering the corpse in an open area exposed to the natural ele-
ments to be consumed by vultures. In some areas of China and on Taiwan, a funeral
may include female strippers as a means of drawing larger crowds to convey the
impression that the deceased was held in high esteem. But this is a text about inter-
cultural communication, not about cultural burial protocols. Accordingly, we will
now address the role of communication as it relates to death and dying in different
cultures.
As noted in Chapter 4 when we discussed religion, cultures have evolved different
perceptions and procedures to deal with the topic of death and dying. They range
from active participation to completely ignoring the issue. However, in the healthcare
professions, death cannot be ignored. Effective and timely communication assists
patients and their families in gathering relevant data about health threats and in
developing appropriate strategies for responding to those threats. The requirement
for healthcare professionals to deliver unpleasant news to patients and their family
members is a daunting task demanding compassion and sensitivity, further intensifiedCONSIDER THIS
Conservative Islamic groups in Pakistan use“cancer of women”
as a euphemism for breast cancer because the word“breast”car-
ries a sexual connotation.^66Death and Dying Across Cultures 373Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).