Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. As the Amish population is growing exponentially, researcher and practitioner interest in Amish health is also growing. This is largely due to demand from practitioners for population-specific cultural guidance. Amish beliefs, practices, attitudes, decision-making processes, financing, and values. In this article, we provide a first-ever exhaustive, narrative review of the Amish health culture literature addressing Amish health conditions elsewhere.
Our overreaching goal is to organize the literature, synthesize research findings, identify orienting perspectives, and clarify research questions and directions. Keywords: Ethnicity and health, Religion and health, Complementary and alternative health, cultural competency, ethics, plain Anabaptist. With a U. Morton, In academia, the Amish have provided an opportunity to better understand illness through comparison with non-Amish.
Many Amish health studies document how lifestyle patterns attributed to Amish culture and religion may increase or decrease the risk of certain illnesses. Geneticists, in particular, find Amish endogamy ideal for studying inherited health conditions.
Amish health research occupies approximately one-fourth of all Amish-focused publications since , and it is one of two major autonomous subject-areas emerging by Anderson, Not only is the time ripe to review the entire literature, but without periodic reviews, a research area may lose 1 organization, e. To help bring organization, coherence, and direction to Amish health research, we offer two primary objectives: organize the literature into topical groupings and then offer syntheses of these topics, that is, instigate new research agendas by identifying novel, reoccurring, unresolved, and contradicting assertions Torraco, We then snowball sampled all bibliographies until no new studies emerged.
We identified health related, peer reviewed publications in journals and edited volumes. The literature and our goals guided our review format selection. However, we were approaching an epistemologically diverse literature with conceptual goals, rendering common systematic procedures inappropriate Green et al.
