Carolyn Smith-Morris
Heroy Hall, Room 415
(214)768-2878
csmorris@smu.edu
For more information on courses taught by Dr. Smith-Morris, please go here.
The Diabetes Epidemic
The world owes a debt of gratitude to the Pima Indians. Long
ago the suppliers of food to starving and desert-weary US military in the Arizona
frontier, this community now hosts scores of researchers and clinicians bent on
understanding and curbing the diabetes epidemic here and around the globe. The Pima
are not alone in their high rates of diabetes and obesity. But they are the poster
children for a world with over 150 million persons with diabetes, including more
than 10 million in the US.
Carolyn Smith-Morris has conducted almost a decade
of work among the Gila River Indian Community, researching the many overlapping factors
in their diabetes epidemic and describing the Pima struggle against it. Beginning with
the prehistoric evolution of a “thrifty gene” adaptation, meeting the abrupt
and enormous changes of colonization and federal Indian policy, and moving slowly into an
era of self-determination, the Pima experience is one of hope and resilience. Theirs
is also an experience of prophetic importance to us all. Their foodways, their reaction
to health care, their perceptions of the disease and of the largely non-Indian army of
clinicians that travel to their Reservation daily, all reflect astonishing similarities
about humans facing epidemic rates of chronic disease.
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