Book excerpt: Loustaunau and Sobo demonstrate the ways in which cultural and social factors shape medicine and health care. After a discussion of culture, the social structure and the impact of poverty, class, gender, and family patterns on health, illness and care-seeking, they explain the similarities and differences of medical systems cross-culturally. The authors call for a more flexible and culturally sensitive system of health care that expresses caring in more holistic ways, and offer examples as to how this might be accomplished in the increasingly multicultural USA.